Character Sets

Emacs classifies characters into various character sets, each of which has a name which is a symbol. Each character belongs to one and only one character set.

In general, there is one character set for each distinct script. For example, latin-iso8859-1 is one character set, greek-iso8859-7 is another, and ascii is another. An Emacs character set can hold at most 9025 characters; therefore, in some cases, characters that would logically be grouped together are split into several character sets. For example, one set of Chinese characters, generally known as Big 5, is divided into two Emacs character sets, chinese-big5-1 and chinese-big5-2.

Function: charsetp object

Return t if object is a character set name symbol, nil otherwise.

Function: charset-list

This function returns a list of all defined character set names.

Function: char-charset character

This function returns the name of the character set that character belongs to.

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