[idn] Representing codepoints (RE: UTF-8 in Internet Drafts)

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>]

--On 31. oktober 2002 16:06 -0500 John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com> wrote:

> James and
> the rest of the JET team have been discussing (at my request)
> ways to present the characters in ASCII text that would make
> the document more comprehensible than the code points alone
> for those reading the document in ASCII text.
advertising someone else's code, and only tangentially relevant to this 
list.....

there's a Perl package out on CPAN called "unidecode", maintained by Sean 
Burke. It can be used to generate ASCII strings from any sequence of 
Unicode codepoints; in some cases, these ASCII strings can remind people 
what the characters were supposed to mean.

For Chinese, for instance, it spits out something resembling Pinyin 
(probably *is* Pinyin, but I don't know enough to guarantee that).

Health warning: I've only played with it....

                   Harald