[Bug libc/10226] Support for GSM 03.38 character set in iconv

["madcoder at debian dot org" <sourceware-bugzilla at sourceware dot org>]

------- Additional Comments From madcoder at debian dot org  2009-06-01 20:51 -------
(In reply to comment #0)
> There is no support for the GSM 03.38 character set as part of iconv. Are there
> any plans to support it?

For what it's worth, GSM has multiple issues:

- GSM is not always in its 7bits packed form (for example, when used in SMPP or
UCP/EMI messages), which means that you need two flavors.

- GSM is often used with the latin1 extension (and I know some other are also
defined) which adds another layer of alternatives.

- the 7bit packed encoding makes it rather unsuitable for iconv interfaces which
assumes that codepoint sizes are multiple of 8 bits: there is no way to push
14bits only for example, you can only transcode 8 gsm codepoints at a time, or
you need to _very_ carefuly craft the data you send (and hence know how the
iconv state works) for it to be useful.

- finally in GSM '\0' is ascii '@', which is a PITA, but arguably not relevant
to iconv.

All in all, I'm not sure that iconv and GSM are a good match.


-- 


http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10226

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