Re: Second byte of multibyte characters causing trouble

> Use "kon" command.
This was a wonderful tip - thank you, Ishii-san! I didn't know about the
command, and it seems to be trying to do what it is designed to do. It
doesn't display Shift-JIS correctly, but it does work for EUC. Since I seem
to be moving in the direction of converting everything to EUC, that should
be okay. But in vi, how do I input Japanese? Is there a key combination
that does what IME does in Windoze?

I also noticed that vi is still not aware of the multi-byte characters - for
example, when moving around in the text, I have to type h or l twice to get
to the next character, and if I want to copy or delete characters I have to
pretend that there are twice as many. Typing "x" just once (or an odd
number of times) is really entertaining - all the characters in a whole word
or sentence change to obscure kanji as kon tries to process the second byte
of one character and the first byte of the next as a character. Is there a
way to make vi aware of multibyte characters? (This is not an absolute
necessity, but would help.)

> Again why not emacs?
I had never used it - in fact, it wasn't even installed on my system. After
you seemed to be recommending it, I installed the "no X" version (I don't
have any graphical interfaces on these machines) and invoked it once to see
what it is like, but it looks like it would be miserable to learn to use
without a mouse, if it would work at all for some features (I had to dig
real deep in the docs to figure out key commands - they constantly refer to
the mouse). It would be no problem to add a mouse to the server that
resides at my desk (well, maybe a bit of a desk space shortage...), but much
of my work is done through ssh to two other servers, and I doubt a mouse
would work in that environment - am I wrong? (Zero experience with mice in
Linux!)

> Assuming you could read/write Japanese, I recommend you subscribe
> PHP-users list (http://ns1.php.gr.jp/mailman/listinfo/php-users)
I do read and write Japanese if I work hard enough at it (lots of copy/paste
to/from a software dictionary - I've lived in Japan 5 years), but reading
and contributing to a mailing list in Japanese could consume my whole work
day! :-) That's why I have been using English lists. But I know that most
of the people on the English lists (maybe everybody except Ishii-san!) don't
work with Japanese systems and can't answer questions about them, so when I
have future questions of this type, I probably should try the php.gr.jp
list. Thanks for the link.

> Are yo using PHP? Then I strongly recommend upgrade to PHP 4.0.6 or
> higher. It supports Japanese very well. It aumatically guess the input
> charset, does the neccessary conversion.
Input from where and conversion to what? Do you mean data typed into forms?
(I had assumed that I control the charset used for form data by the
"charset" variable in the html header, but I haven't tested that theory!)
Or do you mean that if the text in echo statements is in a different charset
than the header (how could it even know?), it will convert it when sending
it out to the browser? (That would be hard to believe, but wonderful if
it's true!)

I'm still unsure of what to do. I was just about to take your advice and
switch all my PHP and Perl files to EUC, when I remembered that I have to
consider other people. After I get the PHP/Perl code working, the webmaster
cleans up my grammar and/or changes the wording to the way he wants it, and
he never uses Linux but only Windows-based editors, which as far as I know
all expect Shift-JIS. Maybe I can train him to always open files with the
EUC->Shift-JIS preprocessor and save them with the Shift-JIS->EUC
postprocessor, but I suspect he won't be happy about it. But if I can get
answers to the above questions, I may be closer to a decision on which
approach is better, all things considered.

Regards,
Karen

--------------------------------
Karen Ellrick
S & C Technology, Inc.
1-21-35 Kusatsu-shinmachi
Hiroshima 733-0834 Japan
(from U.S. 011-81, from Japan 0) 82-293-2838
--------------------------------