33 Non-ascii Characters

This chapter covers the special issues relating to non-ascii characters and how they are stored in strings and buffers.

• Text Representations: Unibyte and multibyte representations
• Converting Representations: Converting unibyte to multibyte and vice versa.
• Selecting a Representation: Treating a byte sequence as unibyte or multi.
• Character Codes: How unibyte and multibyte relate to codes of individual characters.
• Character Sets: The space of possible characters codes is divided into various character sets.
• Chars and Bytes: More information about multibyte encodings.
• Splitting Characters: Converting a character to its byte sequence.
• Scanning Charsets: Which character sets are used in a buffer?
• Translation of Characters: Translation tables are used for conversion.
• Coding Systems: Coding systems are conversions for saving files.
• Input Methods: Input methods allow users to enter various non-ASCII characters without special keyboards.
• Locales: Interacting with the POSIX locale.