Re:Questions about character sets and their encodings

["Kirpal Khalsa"<kirpal_khalsa@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, 

I'm moderately confused by some of the information being passed regarding T.50.
I have a copy dated 09/92 titled International Reference Alphabet (IRA)
(Formerly International Alphabet No. 5 or IA5).

There were two characters that used to be ambiguous (also referred to as
alternate graphic characters): hex23 (2/3) which could be either a pound sign or
a number sign and hex24 (2/4) which could be either a dollar sign or the
universal currency sign. This is still referenced in Table 2. You can have
versions of T.50 that are different from the IRV by selecting non-IRV
combinations of 2/3 and 2/4.

However the G0 part of the IRV shown in Table 5 no longer has alternates. It
specifies 2/3 as the number sign and 2/4 as the dollar sign. So as far as I can
tell, the IRV of IA5 is now identical to 7-bit ASCII.

Am I missing something?

Regards,
    Kirpal Khalsa
    Lotus Development



>>I've been searching for resources on the web on character sets for
>>ASN.1 types, but haven't been able to find what I need.  Does anybody
>>know of such resources?
>>More specifically, my questions are:
>>  IA5String: I've heard this is just 7-bit ASCII, but is that true?


>Yes, IA5String is the same as 7-bit ASCII or ISO IRV 646 with one
>exception (the old one) instead of dollar sign it could be
>currency sign.