Manual Pages  — EUC

euc – EUC encoding of wide characters

SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION SEE ALSO

ENCODING "EUC"

VARIABLE len1 mask1 len2 mask2 len3 mask3 len4 mask4 mask

EUC implements a system of 4 multibyte codesets. A multibyte character in the first codeset consists of len1 bytes starting with a byte in the range of 0x00 to 0x7f. To allow use of ASCII, len1 is always 1. A multibyte character in the second codeset consists of len2 bytes starting with a byte in the range of 0x80-0xff excluding 0x8e and 0x8f. A multibyte character in the third codeset consists of len3 bytes starting with the byte 0x8e. A multibyte character in the fourth codeset consists of len4 bytes starting with the byte 0x8f.

The wchar_t encoding of EUC multibyte characters is dependent on the len and mask arguments. First, the bytes are moved into a wchar_t as follows:

byte0 << ((lenN-1) * 8) | byte1 << ((lenN-2) * 8) | ... | bytelenN-1

The result is then ANDed with ~mask and ORed with maskN. Codesets 2 and 3 are special in that the leading byte (0x8e or 0x8f) is first removed and the lenN argument is reduced by 1.

For example, the ja_JP.eucJP locale has the following VARIABLE line:

VARIABLE        1 0x0000 2 0x8080 2 0x0080 3 0x8000 0x8080

Codeset 1 consists of the values 0x0000 - 0x007f.

Codeset 2 consists of the values who have the bits 0x8080 set.

Codeset 3 consists of the values 0x0080 - 0x00ff.

Codeset 4 consists of the values 0x8000 - 0xff7f excluding the values which have the 0x0080 bit set.

Notice that the global mask is set to 0x8080, this implies that from those 2 bits the codeset can be determined.