Character Sets

Four types of coding conventions are currently supported in the Korean Solaris software:

• N-byte code - This single-byte code has each byte represent a consonant or vowel. These are combined together to build Hangul characters.

• Johap or Packed code - This two-byte code consists of a leading bit followed by three 5-bit fields. These three fields contain the codes or a leading consonant, followed by a vowel, followed by a final consonant (if any) for a Hangul character. This two-byte code is specified in Korean Industry Standard KS C 5601-1992-3.

• Wansung code - This two-byte code is specified in Korean Industry Standard KS C 5601-1987 for Hangul, Hanja, and other characters. In the Korean Solaris software these KS C 5601-1987 characters are in EUC codeset 1.

• ko.UTF-8 - Korean Universal Multiple Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) Transmission Format. ko.UTF-8 supports all the characters of KS C 5601 and 11,172 characters from Johap, as well as all Korean-related Unicode 2.0 characters and fonts. ko.UTF-8 supports the following subset of Unicode:

  • Basic Latin and Latin-i (190 characters) - Row 00 of BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane)

  • Symbolic characters - Row 20 to Row 27, and Row 32 of BMP including box (line) drawing characters that are defined in KS C 5601

  • Numerals that are defined in KS C 5601 (20 characters) - Row 21 and Row FF of BMP

  • Roman, Greek, Japanese, and Cyrillic alphabet characters that are defined in KS C 5601 (362 characters) - Row 02, Row 04, Row 30 and Row FF of BMP

  • Jamo (Hangul alphabet) characters (94 characters) - Row 31 of BMP

  • Pre-composed Hangul syllables (11,172 characters) - From Row AC to Row D7 of BMP

  • Hanja characters defined in KS C 5601 (4,888 characters) - From Row 4E to Row 9F and from Row F9 to Row FA of BMP

These four Korean code conventions at three levels of support:

• User commands support file transfers for existing files in different codes.

• Library functions support application development for existing codes.

• STREAMS modules support existing TTY devices using different codes.