I am not sure what is required in terms of conversion from 'Hex' to Unicode,
but I guess you mean from one character set table to Unicode?
For the past couple of years DATACAT has been working with the British
Library, and the National Libraries of Spain, Sweden, and Italy (Florence) to
investigate the feasibility of using Unicode as an intermediary for
bibliographic exchange between libraries. The project was sponsored under the
European Union CoBRA initiative and is known as CHASE (Character sets in
Europe)
As part of the study, a conversion utility has been built which allows the
conversion of data into and out of Unicode into a variety of different
character sets, including ISO 646, ISO 5426, ISO 5428, ECMA 37, ISO 6438, ISO
5427; ISO 2022 is handled with capability for interpretation of single shifts,
locking shifts, and mapping sequences. The partners in Sweden and Spain ran
EBCDIC systems, and a special switch is incorporated to allow direct
conversion from EBCDIC into Unicode.
The utility is by no means limited to bibliographic conversions. Such
conversions require special handling of the ISO 2709 (MARC) directory map, and
a switch selects such an option. Straightforward text conversion may also be
applied. No testing for SGML structures has been carried out.
The converter itself is written in standard C, with the accompanying table
editor providing a Visual Basic interface and validation routine for the
compilation of the character conversion tables. The converter is due to be
placed in the public domain early this year.
For further details of the software, and accompanying reports, please contact
either myself
Martin Fisk
Principal Consultant, DATACAT-- martin-fisk@msn.com
or
Anthony Brickell
British Library -- anthony.brickell@bl.uk
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:33 EDT