Re: EUC-JP and the Yen sign

[Paul Eggert <eggert at twinsun dot com>]

Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com> writes:

> XFree is certainly no convincing argument for this.  Again, what I got
> told other systems are doing is using the Yen sign.

What authorities do your sources cite?  The IANA's character
assignment table agrees with Bruno Haible: it cites OSF, Unix
International, and Unix System Laboratories Pacific all in saying that
the name "EUC-JP" refers to an encoding that uses US-ASCII for the
first 128 characters.  If you want an encoding that has a Yen sign at
0x5C, you must use a different MIME encoding.

It is true that many Japanese systems use the Yen sign for 0x5C, but
many others use the backslash.  This battle has been going on in Japan
for many years, dating back to traditional alphanumeric terminals.
The older JIS standards specify Yen sign, but many people in Japan
disliked the hassle of being incompatible with ASCII, and used
backslash anyway; so two camps arose.  There is a similar problem with
other ASCII characters too -- it's not just backslash.

I believe EUC-KR is in a similar state, but our company does business
daily with EUC-JP whereas EUC-KR is a relative sidelight, so I'm less
of an expert on the real-world problems with EUC-KR.