Unified Hangul Code (UHC),
or Extended Wansung,
also known under
Microsoft Windows as Code Page 949 (Windows-949, MS949 or ambiguously CP949), is the Microsoft Windows
code page for the
Korean language
Korean (South Korean: , ''hangugeo''; North Korean: , ''chosŏnmal'') is the native language for about 80 million people, mostly of Koreans, Korean descent. It is the official language, official and national language of both North Korea and So ...
. It is an extension of Wansung Code (
KS C 5601:1987, encoded as
EUC-KR) to include all 11172 non-partial
Hangul
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The ...
syllables present in
Johab (KS C 5601:1992 annex 3).
This corresponds to the
pre-composed syllables available in
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
2.0 and later.
Wansung Code has the drawback that it only assigns codes for the 2350 precomposed Hangul syllables which have their own
KS X 1001 (KS C 5601) codepoints (out of 11172 in total, not counting those using obsolete jamo), and requires others to use eight-byte composition sequences, which are not supported by some partial implementations of the standard. UHC resolves this by assigning single codes for all possible syllables constructed using modern jamo, by making assignments outside of the encoding space used for KS X 1001.
The lead byte range is extended to
0x81–FE, and the trail byte range is extended to 0x41–5A, 0x61–7A and 0x81–FE (in EUC-KR, both ranges are 0xA1–FE). The codes outside the EUC-KR ranges are used for the additional hangul. If considered separately, both the EUC-KR Hangul block and the UHC extended Hangul section are in Unicode order.
Terminology
Unified Hangul Code is not registered with
IANA as a standard to communicate information over the Internet. Alternatives include
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''.
UTF-8 is capable of ...
. However, the
W3C/
WHATWG
The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is a community of people interested in evolving HTML and related technologies. The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple Inc., the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software, ...
Encoding Standard used by
HTML5 incorporates the Unified Hangul Code extensions into its definition of "EUC-KR".
Microsoft assigns Windows-949 the label "ks_c_5601-1987",
which properly applies to
KS X 1001 itself (
KS C 5601 being the original name of KS X 1001). The WHATWG treat the label "ks_c_5601-1987" interchangeably with "EUC-KR" with the intent of being "compatible with deployed content".
The
Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intent ...
's "OBSOLETE/EASTASIA" collection of withdrawn mappings included mappings for Unified Hangul Code as "KSC5601.TXT", with the automatically derived mappings for 7-bit KS X 1001 being included as "KSX1001.TXT".
IBM's code page 949 is another, otherwise unrelated, extension of EUC-KR.
International Components for Unicode
International Components for Unicode (ICU) is an open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or cont ...
(ICU) uses "cp949", "949" or "ibm-949" to refer to that IBM code page,
and "ms949" or "windows-949" (or several variants of "ks_c_5601-1987") to refer to the Windows mapping of UHC.
Python, by contrast, recognises "cp949", "949", "ms949" and "uhc" as labels for UHC, and does not include an IBM-949 codec. Out of the labels incorporating the code page number, the WHATWG recognise only "windows-949".
IBM's code page for Unified Hangul Code is called Code page 1363 (IBM-1363), or "Korean MS-Win". It is a combination of
SBCS Code page 1126 and
DBCS Code page 1362. It differs in having a single byte mapping of 0x5C to the
Won sign (U+20A9);
Windows maps 0x5C to U+005C (the Unicode code point for the
backslash) as in ASCII,
although fonts often still render it as a Won sign.
Unicode mapping of the wave dash (0xA1AD) also differs, with the IBM mapping favouring U+301C, while the Microsoft mapping favours U+223C (Tilde Operator). The IBM mapping for UHC is available as "ibm-1363" in ICU,
whereas the ICU "windows-949" codec is referred to as IBM-1261 in some ICU source code comments.
[See, for reference]
ucnv_lmb.cpp
(Brendan Murray, Jim Snyder-Grant), where the lead byte 0x11 is commented as referring to "Korean: ibm-1261" after the definition of ULMBCS_GRP_KO
, but it is mapped to the "windows-949"
ICU codec in the OptGroupByteToCPName
array later in the file.
Single byte codes
Following is the single-byte portion of the code page as defined by IBM. Similarly to
Code page 437, the
control code
In computing and telecommunication, a control character or non-printing character (NPC) is a code point (a number) in a character set, that does not represent a written symbol. They are used as in-band signaling to cause effects other than ...
bytes may be used as control codes or graphical codes depending on context—the graphical codes are shown below. Microsoft uses ASCII mappings for all ASCII bytes, although the backslash may still be rendered as a
won sign.
Footnotes
References
External links
Microsoft's Reference for Windows-949Mapping of Windows-949 to Unicode*International Components for Unicode (ICU) mapping files
ibm-1363_P110-1997.ucmibm-1363_P11B-1998.ucm an
windows-949-2000.ucmICU demonstration for Windows-949 (with ASCII mappings)ICU demonstration for IBM-1363 (with 0x5C as Won sign)
{{Hangul Jamo
949
Encodings of Asian languages
Korean-language computing
Hangul