2-cent Tips

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2-Cent Tips

2-cent Tip: Unicode conversion
2-cent Tips: Same prompt different term

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2-cent Tip: Unicode conversion

Benjamin A. Okopnik ([ben at linuxgazette.net])
Mon, 4 Sep 2006 15:27:16 -0400

A couple of years ago, I decided to stop wrestling with what I call "encoding craziness" for various bits of non-English text that I have scattered around my file system. Russian, for example, has at least four different encodings that I've run into - and guessing which one a given text file was written in was like a game of darts played in the dark. At 300 yards. With your hands tied behind you, so you had to use your toes. Oh, and while you were severely drunk on Stoli vodka. UTF-8 (Unicode) allowed me to, well, unify all of that into one single encoding that was readable without scrambling for whichever character set I needed (and may or may not have installed.) Better yet, Unicode usually displays just fine in HTML browsers - no special entity encoding is required.

For some reason, though, good converters appear to be something of a black art - and finding one that works, as opposed to all those that claim to work, was rather frustrating. Therefore, I decided to write one in my favorite language, Perl - only to find that the job has already been done for me, via the 'encoding' pragma. In other words, conversion from, say, KOI8-R to UTF-8 is no more complex than this:

# Convert and write to a file
perl -Mencoding=koi8r,STDOUT,utf8 -pe0 < file.koi8r > file.utf8
# Or just display it in a pager:
perl -Mencoding=koi8r,STDOUT,utf8 -pe0 < file.koi8r|less

It is literally that simple. Pretty much every encoding you can imagine is available (see 'perldoc Encode::Supported' for the naming conventions and charsets). The conversion does not have to be to UTF-8 - it'll do any of the listed charsets - but why would you care?

# Print the Kanji for 'Rakuda' (Camel) from multibyte strings:
perl -Mencoding=euc-jp,STDOUT,utf-8 -wle'print "Follow the
\xF1\xD1\xF1\xCC!"'
Follow the 駱駝!
# Or you can do it in Hiragana, but using Unicode values instead:
perl -Mencoding=shift-jis,STDOUT,utf8 -wle'print "Follow the
\x{3089}\x{304F}\x{3060}!"'
Follow the らくだ!

* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *

[ Discussion continued (10 messages/38.02kB) ]

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2-cent Tips: Same prompt different term

Andrew Elian ([a_elian at sympatico.ca])
Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:18:37 -0400

Hello.

Here's a quick tidbit to help the PS1 variable do the right thing depending on the terminal - X or otherwise. I've added these lines to my .bash_profile and found them useful:

case $TERM in
        xterm)
                export TERM=xterm-color
                export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}:${PWD/#$HOME/~}\007"'
                export PS1="$ "
        ;;

        rxvt|Eterm)
                export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}:${PWD/#$HOME/~}\007"'
                export PS1="$ "
        ;;

        linux)
                export PS1="\[\033[0;32m\]\u \[\033[1;32m\]\W]\[\033[0;32m\] "
        ;;
esac

Sincerely, Andrew

[ Discussion continued (5 messages/4.85kB) ]