Posting Chinese Characters on the Web

Putting Chinese characters on a website is only slightly more complex than posting bullets or copyright symbols. Here, I’ll try to give you a very brief tutorial of both, including some screenshots.

To post a Unicode-based character on a website, try the following two steps:
1. Find the integer number that represents the character you are interested in. There are many great sites out there that show Unicode tables (here’s just one example). In this case, let’s say you want to display the Greek letter pi. According to the look-up table, its integer representation is 960.
2. Type &#INTEGER where INTEGER is the number that represents the character. So, in this case, we can produce the Greek letter, pi, like so: π.

To post a Chinese character on a website, try these steps:
1. Find the integer number that represents the character you are interested in. Without getting into the details of UTF8 just yet, you’ll find that it takes a very large integer to display Chinese characters. So, instead of using the normal base-10 counting system, these look-up tables will usually be base-16, or hexidecimal. This website has been a great source for looking up the hexidecimal Unicode for Chinese characters that I have been interested in. Let’s say you want the character for “beautiful”. In this website, you could either type in “beautiful” or its Pinyin form (more on Pinyin later), which is “mei”. So, we learn that the Unicode hexidecimal code for “beautiful” is 7F8E.
2. Now, you must convert the hexidecimal code to integer code. For those of us who are Macintosh users, this is pretty easy.
2a. Bring up the basic calculator loaded with every Macintosh. You can do this by typing “calculator” within Spotlight.

2b. Put calculator in “Programmer” mode using the “View” menu (hey, you’re a programmer! ).

2c. Put calculator in “Hex” mode by clicking the “Hex” button.

2d. For fun, put calculator in “Unicode” mode by clicking the “Unicode” button. This allows you to see the character representation of what your’e typing. It’s a good sanity check.

2e. Type in your code - 7F8E. You should see the Chinese character for beautiful displayed on the far left.

2f. Click the “Dec” button to convert this hexidecimal code to Decimal (integer). The calculator should report 32654.

3. Now that you have converted the Chinese character to integer, you are ready to put it on the web. Just type &#INTEGER where INTEGER is 32654, like this: 美.

There are other ways to figure out the hexidecimal representation of Chinese characters using your Macintosh. Since this post is getting really lengthy, I’ll save it for another day. I hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any questions.

– bk

PS If you’re interested in more technical details about Unicode, UTF8, and other discussions, check out this Wiki.

What is Unicode?

It’s important to have a good understand of Unicode when building international websites or applications. In future blogs, I’ll describe how to put Chinese characters on a website like so: 中文 (this means “Chinese Language”). Also, in future blogs, I’ll describe some interesting problems I ran into when trying to build a Mac application to display Chinese characters with a US “localization”.

Simply put, Unicode is an international effort to provide a unique number for characters representing symbols or language constructs. The official Unicode website describes itself this way: “Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.” So, whether you want the copyright symbol (©), a cool looking bullet (•), or a Chinese character (美), you simply must figure out what the numeric representation is and how to present it to your reader.

Soon, I’ll describe how to find the Unicode representations of your favorite Chinese characters as well as how to put them on the web or in your Mac app.

– bk

What is Global Talk?

Hello and Welcome to globaltalksoftware.com !

My name is Bob.

For the past ten years, I have worked for a major corporation in the United States in various engineering roles, and, most recently, project management. Since I was a 10-year old boy, I have loved programming software and have had a fascination with the Chinese language.

Recently, I have switched my household over to Apple’s incredible Mac Mini and started to play with the XCode Developer Tools that are included with every Mac. For the last several weeks, I have started to develop an application to teach vocabulary to the native English speaker wanting to learn to read, write, and speak Mandarin Chinese.

There are several purposes for this website / blog. Since I am currently developing a custom software tool to help the beginner learn Chinese vocabulary, I wanted to share it with others. So, I have several reasons for doing this website “blog style”:

1. I would like to build a base of interested Beta testers and future users of a Mandarin Chinese learning application for the Macintosh OS X.

2. I would like to share my experiences with you in writing the code, deciding on feature trade-offs, and exchange ideas with you.

3. I would like this to be a “mini-portal” for exchanging best practices related to learning Chinese.

I hope this is enough to pique your interest! I look forward to seeing where this blog and software development take me! Take care, and stay in touch!

– bk