path: root/system/doc/reference_manual/character_set.xml

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<!DOCTYPE chapter SYSTEM "chapter.dtd">

<chapter>
  <header>
    <copyright>
      <year>2014</year><year>2014</year>
      <holder>Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved.</holder>
    </copyright>
    <legalnotice>
      The contents of this file are subject to the Erlang Public License,
      Version 1.1, (the "License"); you may not use this file except in
      compliance with the License. You should have received a copy of the
      Erlang Public License along with this software. If not, it can be
      retrieved online at http://www.erlang.org/.

      Software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS"
      basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See
      the License for the specific language governing rights and limitations
      under the License.

    </legalnotice>

    <title>Character Set and Source File Encoding</title>
    <prepared></prepared>
    <docno></docno>
    <date></date>
    <rev></rev>
    <file>character_set.xml</file>
  </header>

  <section>
    <title>Character Set</title>
    <p>In Erlang 4.8/OTP R5A the syntax of Erlang tokens was extended to
      allow the use of the full ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) character set. This
      is noticeable in the following ways:</p>
    <list type="bulleted">
      <item>
        <p>All the Latin-1 printable characters can be used and are
          shown without the escape backslash convention.</p>
      </item>
      <item>
        <p>Atoms and variables can use all Latin-1 letters.</p>
      </item>
    </list>
    <table>
      <row>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle"><em>Octal</em></cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle"><em>Decimal</em></cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">&nbsp;</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle"><em>Class</em></cell>
      </row>
      <row>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">200 - 237</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">128 - 159</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">&nbsp;</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">Control characters</cell>
      </row>
      <row>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">240 - 277</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">160 - 191</cell>
        <cell align="right" valign="middle">- &iquest;</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">Punctuation characters</cell>
      </row>
      <row>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">300 - 326</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">192 - 214</cell>
        <cell align="center" valign="middle">&Agrave; - &Ouml;</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">Uppercase letters</cell>
      </row>
      <row>
        <cell align="center" valign="middle">327</cell>
        <cell align="center" valign="middle">215</cell>
        <cell align="center" valign="middle">&times;</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">Punctuation character</cell>
      </row>
      <row>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">330 - 336</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">216 - 222</cell>
        <cell align="center" valign="middle">&Oslash; - &THORN;</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">Uppercase letters</cell>
      </row>
      <row>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">337 - 366</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">223 - 246</cell>
        <cell align="center" valign="middle">&szlig; - &ouml;</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">Lowercase letters</cell>
      </row>
      <row>
        <cell align="center" valign="middle">367</cell>
        <cell align="center" valign="middle">247</cell>
        <cell align="center" valign="middle">&divide;</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">Punctuation character</cell>
      </row>
      <row>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">370 - 377</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">248 - 255</cell>
        <cell align="center" valign="middle">&oslash; - &yuml;</cell>
        <cell align="left" valign="middle">Lowercase letters</cell>
      </row>
      <tcaption>Character Classes.</tcaption>
    </table>
    <p>In Erlang/OTP R16B the syntax of Erlang tokens was extended to
       handle Unicode. The support is limited to
       string literals and comments. Atoms, module names, and
       function names are restricted to the ISO-Latin-1 range.
       More about the usage of Unicode in Erlang source files
       can be found in <seealso
       marker="stdlib:unicode_usage#unicode_in_erlang">STDLIB's User's
       Guide</seealso>.</p>
  </section>
  <section>
    <title>Source File Encoding</title>
    <p>The Erlang source file <marker
      id="encoding">encoding</marker> is selected by a
      comment in one of the first two lines of the source file. The
      first string that matches the regular expression
      <c>coding\s*[:=]\s*([-a-zA-Z0-9])+</c> selects the encoding. If
      the matching string is not a valid encoding it is ignored. The
      valid encodings are <c>Latin-1</c> and <c>UTF-8</c> where the
      case of the characters can be chosen freely.</p>
    <p>The following example selects UTF-8 as default encoding:</p>
      <pre>
%% coding: utf-8</pre>
    <p>Two more examples, both selecting Latin-1 as default encoding:</p>
      <pre>
%% For this file we have chosen encoding = Latin-1</pre>
      <pre>
%% -*- coding: latin-1 -*-</pre>
    <p>The default encoding for Erlang source files was changed from
      Latin-1 to UTF-8 in Erlang OTP 17.0.</p>
  </section>
</chapter>