Re: Greek support for SMS: How does it ACTUALLY work?

[P. Christeas]

On Τρίτη 15 Μάιος 2007, Pawel Kot wrote:
> 
> On 5/15/07, Tirs Abril <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Hello! After a long time lurking the list :-) I finally have a question to
> > ask. After several years using Gnokii as part of an email-to-SMS 
interface,
> > now I need to send SMS in Greek language. To simplify, let's say that I do 
it
> > like this:
>> ...
> > Can anyone please tell me:
> >
> > 1) Which encoding should I use for the Greek text to be piped into Gnokii?
> 
> The one, your LC_ALL is set to. Probably some gr_GR-UTF8.
Actually, this would be el_GR ..
> 
There are two charset we use in Greece, and two ways to encode your SMS's to 
greek:
For desktop, you may have el_GR in either iso8859-7 or UTF-8.
For GSM, there are two ways, either: the utf8 encoded SMS (which is very few 
characters, ~50 compared to a typical 160-char one) and the GSM one.
The GSM uses the normal, latin chars for the letters that are also found in 
the latin alphabet and a few greek chars for the rest.
Converting between iso8859-7 and utf8 should be trivial in all cases.
I think I had successfully read my phonebook, all containing greek characters 
from both a utf-8 and a gsm-encoded phone. But it has been quite long ago.

Anyway, one note: Converting *back* from GSM to linux is non-trivial: If the 
word contains both latin and Greek chars, you should also convert the latin 
ones to their greek equivalents. Otherwise you have weird results..

FYI: the alphabet is
ΑΒΓΔΕΖΗΘΙΚΛΜΝΞΟΠΡΣΤΥΦΧΨΩ
αβγδεζηθικλμνξοπρστυφχψω

My mailer (kmail) should make sure the encoding is set right for this mail :)

My 5 Eurocents..