Re: SMS encoding?

[Osma Suominen]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Dimitris Stasinopoulos wrote:

> Hi, any news as to what is happening with the encoding of the SMS messages
> in the phone? Trying to read SMS messages that are in ISO8859-7 encoding
> with 0.5.0 returns ??? for characters that are not in latin1...

Short answer: gnokii doesn't really handle different character sets
gracefully in all cases but assumes latin1 in many places (which,
incidentally, works most of the time so mostly nobody cares).

AFAIK messages on the phone can be encoded with either the 7-bit
"Default Alphabet" or Unicode (16-bit UCS2), not ISO8859-7. But of
course many ISO8859-7 characters can be represented in the default
alphabet and all of them in UCS2. So you probably mean that the message
is encoded on the phone in UCS2 and contains characters that are present
in ISO8859-7 but not in ISO8859-1 (Latin1).

Character set conversion in gnokii should work pretty well for UCS2
messages, but not necessarily for Default Alphabet messages (they are
always converted to/from Latin1 regardless of the locale).

In that case you should check that your locale settings are correct. If
you have a locale with ISO8859-1 charset, there's not much gnokii can do
for you - there's no way non-Latin1 characters can be shown on your
terminal. You should try with a ISO8859-7 or perhaps UTF-8 locale
instead, that might work better.

I've been working with better character set support for gnokii for some
days but I don't have working code yet. The problem seems to be much
tougher than what I initially thought. I'm trying to break up the task
into smaller pieces that could be worked on independent of each other
(divide et impera).

-Osma

PS. Now that I think of it, it might be that the symbols you are
referring to are the "missing" Greek symbols that exist in the Default
Alphabet but not in Latin-1...in that case switching locales won't help
and gnokii has to be fixed instead. Don't hold your breath, though...

-- 
*** Osma Suominen *** address@hidden *** http://www.iki.fi/ozone/ ***