PATH Mac OS 8 and 9 Developer Documentation > Text Encoding Conversion Manager
Programming With the Text Encoding Conversion Manager

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Text Encoding Specifications

One of the primary data types used by both the Text Encoding Converter and the Unicode Converter is a text encoding specification. This section highlights the text encoding specification. The chapter Basic Text Types Reference describes it fully, including its three components, and the values you specify for them.

A text encoding specification is a set of numeric codes used to identify a text encoding, which may be simple coded character set or a character encoding scheme. It contains these three parts that specify the text encoding: the text encoding base, the text encoding variant, and the text encoding format. You use two text encoding specifications--one for the source encoding of the text and one for its the destination encoding--when you call the Text Encoding Converter or the Unicode Converter to convert text.

The text encoding base value is the primary specification of the source or target encoding. The text encoding variant specifies one among possibly several minor variants of a particular base encoding or group of base encodings. A text encoding format specifies a way of formatting or algorithmically transforming a particular base encoding. (UTF-7 format is the Unicode standard formatted for transmission through channels that can handle only 7-bit values.)