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.TH encoding n "8.1" Tcl "Tcl Built-In Commands"
.so man.macros
.BS
.SH NAME
encoding \- Manipulate encodings
.SH SYNOPSIS
\fBencoding \fIoption\fR ?\fIarg arg ...\fR?
.BE
.SH INTRODUCTION
.PP
Strings in Tcl are logically a sequence of 16-bit Unicode characters.
These strings are represented in memory as a sequence of bytes that
may be in one of several encodings: modified UTF\-8 (which uses 1 to 3
bytes per character), 16-bit
.QW Unicode
(which uses 2 bytes per character, with an endianness that is
dependent on the host architecture), and binary (which uses a single
byte per character but only handles a restricted range of characters).
Tcl does not guarantee to always use the same encoding for the same
string.
.PP
Different operating system interfaces or applications may generate
strings in other encodings such as Shift\-JIS.  The \fBencoding\fR
command helps to bridge the gap between Unicode and these other
formats.
.SH DESCRIPTION
.PP
Performs one of several encoding related operations, depending on
\fIoption\fR.  The legal \fIoption\fRs are:
.TP
\fBencoding convertfrom\fR ?\fIencoding\fR? \fIdata\fR
.
Convert \fIdata\fR to Unicode from the specified \fIencoding\fR.  The
characters in \fIdata\fR are treated as binary data where the lower
8-bits of each character is taken as a single byte.  The resulting
sequence of bytes is treated as a string in the specified
\fIencoding\fR.  If \fIencoding\fR is not specified, the current
system encoding is used.
.TP
\fBencoding convertto\fR ?\fIencoding\fR? \fIstring\fR
.
Convert \fIstring\fR from Unicode to the specified \fIencoding\fR.
The result is a sequence of bytes that represents the converted
string.  Each byte is stored in the lower 8-bits of a Unicode
character (indeed, the resulting string is a binary string as far as
Tcl is concerned, at least initially).  If \fIencoding\fR is not
specified, the current system encoding is used.
.TP
\fBencoding dirs\fR ?\fIdirectoryList\fR?
.
Tcl can load encoding data files from the file system that describe
additional encodings for it to work with. This command sets the search
path for \fB*.enc\fR encoding data files to the list of directories
\fIdirectoryList\fR. If \fIdirectoryList\fR is omitted then the
command returns the current list of directories that make up the
search path. It is an error for \fIdirectoryList\fR to not be a valid
list. If, when a search for an encoding data file is happening, an
element in \fIdirectoryList\fR does not refer to a readable,
searchable directory, that element is ignored.
.TP
\fBencoding names\fR
.
Returns a list containing the names of all of the encodings that are
currently available. 
The encodings
.QW utf-8
and
.QW iso8859-1
are guaranteed to be present in the list.
.TP
\fBencoding system\fR ?\fIencoding\fR?
.
Set the system encoding to \fIencoding\fR. If \fIencoding\fR is
omitted then the command returns the current system encoding.  The
system encoding is used whenever Tcl passes strings to system calls.
.SH EXAMPLE
.PP
It is common practice to write script files using a text editor that
produces output in the euc-jp encoding, which represents the ASCII
characters as singe bytes and Japanese characters as two bytes.  This
makes it easy to embed literal strings that correspond to non-ASCII
characters by simply typing the strings in place in the script.
However, because the \fBsource\fR command always reads files using the
current system encoding, Tcl will only source such files correctly
when the encoding used to write the file is the same.  This tends not
to be true in an internationalized setting.  For example, if such a
file was sourced in North America (where the ISO8859\-1 is normally
used), each byte in the file would be treated as a separate character
that maps to the 00 page in Unicode.  The resulting Tcl strings will
not contain the expected Japanese characters.  Instead, they will
contain a sequence of Latin-1 characters that correspond to the bytes
of the original string.  The \fBencoding\fR command can be used to
convert this string to the expected Japanese Unicode characters.  For
example,
.PP
.CS
set s [\fBencoding convertfrom\fR euc-jp "\exA4\exCF"]
.CE
.PP
would return the Unicode string
.QW "\eu306F" ,
which is the Hiragana letter HA.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
Tcl_GetEncoding(3)
.SH KEYWORDS
encoding, unicode
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