On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 10:50:25AM +0800, rae l wrote: > In China, there's also a trend moving ahead from 2bytes charsets > (GB2312/GBK/GB18030/BIG5) to UTF-8, so all Chinese characters will > need 3 bytes for each to each instead of 2 from then on. The 255 > filename length limit the Chinese filename to 85 characters: Sure, but 85 characters is a lot, given that each character might be the equivalent of multiple letters. For example the English word "country", which takes six characters, or 6 bytes in UTF-8, can be encoded as a single Chinese ideograph, which can be encoded in 3 bytes in UTF-8. Something like "United States of America", is encoded in 24 bytes in English, and 6 bytes (two ideographs) in Chinese in UTF-8. My name, "Theodore Yue Tak Ts'o", takes 21 bytes in English and UTF-8. In Chinese, it's 3 ideographs, or 9 bytes in UTF-8. I'm choosing fairly basied examples here, of course, but I think it's in general true. As a final example consider, "The Tao which can be described is not the true Tao". This can be expressed *much* more succiently in Chinese. :-) So I don't think people who use the Chinese writing system have much to complain about with respect to the 255 byte / 85 ideograph limit. I have much more sympathy for people who trying to are trying to write something like "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" in Russian, and find that it takes many more bytes in UTF-8..... - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
