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Emacs classifies characters into various character sets, each of which has a name which is a symbol. Each character belongs to one and only one character set.
In general, there is one character set for each distinct script. For
example, latin-iso8859-1
is one character set,
greek-iso8859-7
is another, and ascii
is another. An
Emacs character set can hold at most 9025 characters; therefore, in some
cases, characters that would logically be grouped together are split
into several character sets. For example, one set of Chinese
characters, generally known as Big 5, is divided into two Emacs
character sets, chinese-big5-1
and chinese-big5-2
.
ascii characters are in character set ascii
. The
non-ascii characters 128 through 159 are in character set
eight-bit-control
, and codes 160 through 255 are in character set
eight-bit-graphic
.
Returns
t
if object is a symbol that names a character set,nil
otherwise.
This function returns the name of the character set that character belongs to.
This function returns the charset property list of the character set charset. Although charset is a symbol, this is not the same as the property list of that symbol. Charset properties are used for special purposes within Emacs; for example,
preferred-coding-system
helps determine which coding system to use to encode characters in a charset.