I thought that marc-ruby did MARC8 already!  Wait, does it just do it in 
'native' ruby interpreter, but not in jruby?

I'm dealing with records in MARC8 now I think with marc-ruby, and it 
looked like the non-roman characters were coming accross okay! I might 
need to go investigate my setup further now....

Jonathan

Ed Summers wrote:
> Hi Brendan:
>
> Ahh the lovely MARC-8 :-)
>
> It's a fair bit of effort I think. One approach could be to porting
> the MARC8->Unicode functionality from pymarc [1,2]. It's only one-way,
> but that's normally what most sane people want to do anyhow.
>
> Another approach would be to look into wrapping yaz-iconv [3] from
> IndexData which provides much more (and faster) MARC related character
> mapping facilities.
>
> If you just want to get something done without extending ruby-marc you
> can pre-process your data with yaz-marcdump and then throw it at
> ruby-marc. Or perhaps if you are in jruby-land you could use marc4j
> which has MARC-8 support.
>
> I've cc'ed code4lib since someone else might have some better ideas.
> Thanks for writing.
>
> //Ed
>
> [1] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ehs-pobox/pymarc/dev/annotate/head%3A/pymarc/marc8.py
> [2] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ehs-pobox/pymarc/dev/annotate/head%3A/pymarc/marc8_mapping.py
> [3] http://www.indexdata.com/yaz/doc/yaz-iconv.html
> [4] http://marc4j.tigris.org/
>
> On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 3:22 AM, Brendan Boesen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>   
>> Hi Guys,
>>
>> I guess this is the 'bug the authors if you need it' email.
>>
>> I'm trying to parse a MARC record and it contains Chinese characters.  From
>> the leader:
>>        01051cam  2200265 a 4504
>> it looks like the record uses MARC8 encoding.
>>
>> I'm investigating a way to get a Unicode encoded one but that may not work
>> out.  What sort of effort do you think is involved in adding MARC8 support
>> into marc-ruby? (And is there anything I could do to help with that?)
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Brendan Boesen
>> National Library of Australia
>>
>>
>>     
>
>