-
Lately, I've been trying to download from Japan with K-lite to see what I'd find. At first, I was just making my way over there by entering a purposely vague search(i.e. one letter of the alphabet) so that I'd get some matches with asian filenames, since quite a few of them tend to have english letters by themselves, surrounded by upper ASCII characters, which Kazaa ignores. I'd just start downloading some of them to find more users to search, etc. This still works fine since I can't actually make out what the text says, I just have to download some of it and view/hear it to see what it is. I decided to try and search for some of the sub-strings I was seeing in a number of the filenames, only to be reminded that that Kazaa just ignores anything upper ASCII in the search box(at least on a machine with English as the installed language such as my own).
What I'd like to know is what is causing the differing search behavior of Kazaa, on machines that use other(upper ASCII encoded) languages. Is it based on the installed language of your OS, like some driver/DLL file that interfaces with Windows applications, or something in the highly guarded Fasttrack protocol? But even then, with K-Lite running on a Japanese Windows box, would it only allow you to search for the characters by themselves like I see them on MY screen, or as a legit Japanese character/ideogram? Can you even see/use the upper ASCII characters that I see on my computer, on a Japanese Windows box?
Not only are there three major encoding schemes for Japanese Text on the net, but the messiest of the three is Shift-JIS, developed by Microsoft for their Japanese version of Windows!! It uses both lower and upper ASCII, where the other two, EUC-JP and ISO-2022-JP, use all upper, or all lower ASCII, respectively. But it uses some lower-ASCII as well, which has to implement a bunch of rules/exceptions to avoid collisions with the other two schemes(see http://lfw.org/text/jp-www.html).
So I'm not sure which encoding scheme is being used on the Japanese filenames I see. If I had to make a guess, I'd say it was EUC-JP, which is purely upper-ASCII, because the only lower-ASCII characters I see english letters clearly not part of the main Japanese text(in parenthesis, separated by a space, a "multiplication" dot, etc.). But this wouldn't make sense if Microsoft still uses their half-lower, half-upper ASCII scheme in their operating systems.
If anyone out there has any experience with program behavior, with respect to text encoding, especially Japanese, please let me know what I'm missing here. Is there something possibly in the registry, a "language" key somewhere that can be configured?
-caution-
-
I forgot to mention that I installed the Japanese version of K-Lite to attempt to do some test searches - however it behaves the same way, only giving matches to upper ASCII characters that LOOK like a normal alphabet letter, but have a cedilla, umlaut, accent etc. and ignoring everything else just like the English version.
