NAME
encoding - Manipulate encodings
SYNOPSIS
encoding option ?arg arg ...?
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INTRODUCTION
Strings in Tcl are encoded using 16-bit Unicode charac
ters. Different operating system interfaces or applica
tions may generate strings in other encodings such as
Shift-JIS. The encoding command helps to bridge the gap
between Unicode and these other formats.
DESCRIPTION
Performs one of several encoding related operations,
depending on option. The legal options are:
encoding convertfrom ?encoding? data
Convert data to Unicode from the specified encod
ing. The characters in data are treated as binary
data where the lower 8-bits of each character is
taken as a single byte. The resulting sequence of
bytes is treated as a string in the specified
encoding. If encoding is not specified, the cur
rent system encoding is used.
encoding convertto ?encoding? string
Convert string from Unicode to the specified encod
ing. The result is a sequence of bytes that repre
sents the converted string. Each byte is stored in
the lower 8-bits of a Unicode character. If encod
ing is not specified, the current system encoding
is used.
encoding names
Returns a list containing the names of all of the
encodings that are currently available.
encoding system ?encoding?
Set the system encoding to encoding. If encoding is
omitted then the command returns the current system
encoding. The system encoding is used whenever Tcl
passes strings to system calls.
EXAMPLE
It is common practice to write script files using a text
editor that produces output in the euc-jp encoding, which
represents the ASCII characters as singe bytes and
embed literal strings that correspond to non-ASCII charac
ters by simply typing the strings in place in the script.
However, because the source command always reads files
using the ISO8859-1 encoding, Tcl will treat each byte in
the file as a separate character that maps to the 00 page
in Unicode. The resulting Tcl strings will not contain
the expected Japanese characters. Instead, they will con
tain a sequence of Latin-1 characters that correspond to
the bytes of the original string. The encoding command
can be used to convert this string to the expected
Japanese Unicode characters. For example,
set s [encoding convertfrom euc-jp "\xA4\xCF"]
would return the Unicode string "\u306F", which is the
Hiragana letter HA.
SEE ALSO
Tcl_GetEncoding(3)
KEYWORDS
encoding
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