Character Sets for Survey Messages


The standard character set for EFS Survey: UTF-8

The EFS Survey admin area is coded in UTF-8. Similarly, for newly created projects the
UTF-8 character set is set as default, if you have not made any different presettings for your
account.
UTF-8 is a character set defined by the Unicode Consortium.
Using UTF-8 will significantly facilitate implementation of foreign language and multilingual projects, in particular:

  • UTF-8 encompasses all characters that there are, thus all literary languages can be
    reproduced.

  • You can enter characters from any given language directly in the admin area using
    the keyboard.

  • All of the entered data and settings will be saved internally and uniformly in UTF8 – questionnaire texts, participant data, internal EFS Survey data, such as to-do notes or user accounts.

  • The answers of participants to open questions are coded uniformly in UTF-8, thus
    all open entries in multilingual surveys can be exported and viewed in one single
    record.

  • Survey and panel passwords can contain characters from all possible languages

 

Character sets that can be used in EFS Survey


You can set the character set of your projects yourself. Tivian recommends the use
of the UTF-8 in general, this is true in particular with surveys that otherwise would
require several character sets.
The following table contains a complete selection of all available character sets.

Character set

Description

Character set

Description

UTF-8

International character set
Standard character set of EFS Survey

ISO 8859-1 West European

Latin 1
Covers the languages Albanian, Danish, German, English,
Faroeic, Finnish, French, Galizic, Erse, Icelandic, Italian,
Catalan, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish and
Spanish. A few characters, such as the Dutch “ij”, German quotation marks below and the Euro symbol are missing.

ISO 8859-2 East European

Latin 2
Croatian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Czech and
Hungarian.

ISO 8859-3 South European

Latin 3
Esperanto, Galizic, Maltese and Turkish

ISO 8859-4 Baltic

Latin 4
Estonian, Finnish, Greenlandic, Latvian and Lithuanian

ISO 8859-5 Cyrillic

Covers largely the languages Bulgarian, Macedonian,
Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian and White Russian.

ISO 8859-6 Arabian

Arabian. The direction of the text is from right to left.

ISO 8859-7 Greek

Modern Greek

ISO 8859-8 Hebrew

Hebrew. The direction of the text is from right to left.

ISO-8859-9 Turkish

Latin 5
Turkish. Based on ISO 6659-1, contains Turkish characters instead of Icelandic ones. Is also used for Kurdish.

ISO 8859-13 Baltic

Latin 7
Baltic languages. Replaces Latin 4 and Latin 6.

ISO -8859-15 West European

Latin 9
Extension of ISO-8859-1, in which a few seldom used symbols have been replaced with the Euro symbol, French and Finnish characters. Thus the languages French and Finnish have been covered completely.

ASCII (7-bit Charset)

ASCII character set

KO18-R, Russian

Russian and Bulgarian

Simplified Chinese, PRC standard

Chinese simplified

GB2312, EUC encoding, Simplified Chinese

Chinese simplified

GBK, Simplified Chinese

Chinese simplified

CNS11643 (Plane 1-3), EUC encoding,
Traditional Chinese

Traditional Chinese

Big5, Traditional Chinese

Traditional Chinese. Used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Big5 with Hong Kong extensions, Traditional Chinese

Traditional Chinese with extensions for the Cantonese dialect

JISX 0201, 0208 and 0212, EUC encoding Japanese

Japanese

JISX 0201, 0208 and 0212, EUC encoding Japanese

Japanese

Shift-JIS, Japanese

Japanese

JIS X 0201, 0208, in ISO 2022 form,
Japanese

Japanese

KS C 5601, EUC encoding, Korean

Korean

ISO 2022 KR, Korean

Korean

TIS620 Thai

Thai

 

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