UCS2 easier to use in Visual C++, than UTF encoding. What languages I can not support in UCS2 encoding?
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Nothing you're likely to care about or, more to the point, have fonts for. UCS2 gives you the Basic Multilingual Plane; you can find overviews of the assigned planes on the Unicode site
- 0 - Basic Multilingual Plane
- 1 - Supplementary Multilingual Plane (ancient symbols, Klingon, etc.)
- 2 - Supplementary Ideagraphic Plane (CJK unified ideographs extensions)
- 3 - Tertiary Ideographic Plane (ancient Chinese characters)
- 14 - Supplementary Special-Purpose Plane (tag characters and variations - ?)
Of course if you really have UTF-16 support then you can access all of these anyway but if you're asking if you can ignore those then, in practice, probably yes.
Rup
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1 I would not suggest ignoring non-BMP planes as for example for Japanese these characters are not so rare in names and ignoring non-BMP is generally very bad and never recommended. – Artyom Nov 25 '10 at 15:06
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@Artyom OK, thanks - I guess that's characters in the SIP then? Yes, I agree it's best to support everything properly but without font support for the SIP (and again I've never seen any) if you ignore the UTF-16 extension area then you'll just end up with two unknown characters rather than one displayed which doesn't seem like a terrible trade-off for the extra development time. – Rup Nov 25 '10 at 15:13
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5UCS-2 is an ancient and embarrassing antemillennial encoding of 1/17th of the Unicode repertoire. Only ever use a UTF encoding: anything else is just broken. UTF-8 is usually better for space requirements, UTF-32 is usually better for direct addressability. UTF-16 is the worst of both world, because people confuse it for UCS-2. – tchrist Nov 26 '10 at 21:52
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The Unicode.org website includes an index of code blocks in code order from which you can see that as of Unicode 6.0, plane 1 includes:
- Linear B Syllabary
- Linear B Ideograms
- Aegean Numbers
- Old Italic
- Gothic
- Ugaritic
- Deseret
- Shavian
- Osmanya
- Cypriot Syllabary
- Byzantine Musical Symbols
- Musical Symbols
- Tai Xuan Jing Symbols
- Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols
and plane 2 includes:
- CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B
- CJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement
- Tags
- Variation Selectors Supplement
Gareth Rees
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