Converting non-ASCII to ASCII

Stephane Bortzmeyer bortzmeyer at nic.fr
Mon Jun 25 09:12:29 CEST 2007


On Sun, Jun 24, 2007 at 05:27:38PM -0700,
 Doug Ewell <dewell at roadrunner.com> wrote 
 a message of 37 lines which said:

> My opinion is that we need to be able to represent non-ASCII in the
> Registry by some means, either hex NCRs or UTF-8 or something, and
> that it's not necessary or feasible to come up with a pure-ASCII
> transliteration for everything.  But again, this is the place to
> discuss additions and changes to the Registry contents, and LTRU is
> the place to discuss changing the rules.

What may be on-topic for the ietf-languages list is to remind people
that there is *no* way to do *automatic* transliteration to ASCII in
most cases.

Proven&#xE7;al => Provencal is an easy case, but there is no general
rule to do such a conversion from Unicode to ASCII. (And specially no
standard rule, for instance, there is no standard way to transliterate
Arabic characters to Latin characters: english-speaking people write
"Iraq", french-speaking write "Irak" and so on.)


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