The Legacy-Mixed encoding

Desktop Entry Standard
Prev |  |

# B. The Legacy-Mixed encoding

The Legacy-Mixed encoding corresponds to the traditional encoding of desktop files in older versions of the GNOME and KDE desktop files. In this encoding, the encoding of each localestring key is determined by the locale tag for that key, if any. For keys without a locale tag, the value must contain only ASCII characters.

If the locale tag includes an .ENCODING part, then that determines the encoding for the line. Otherwise, the encoding is determined by the language, or language-country pair from the locale tag, according to the following table.

Encoding | Aliases | Tags
--- | --- | ---
ARMSCII-8 (*) |  | by
BIG5 |  | zh_TW
CP1251 |  | be bg
EUC-CN | GB2312 | zh_CN
EUC-JP |  | ja
EUC-KR |  | ko
GEORGIAN-ACADEMY (*) |  |
GEORGIAN-PS (*) |  | ka
ISO-8859-1 |  | br ca da de en es eu fi fr gl it nl wa no pt pt sv
ISO-8859-2 |  | cs hr hu pl ro sk sl sq sr
ISO-8859-3 |  | eo
ISO-8859-5 |  | mk sp
ISO-8859-7 |  | el
ISO-8859-9 |  | tr
ISO-8859-13 |  | lt lv mi
ISO-8859-14 |  | ga cy
ISO-8859-15 |  | et
KOI8-R |  | ru
KOI8-U |  | uk
TCVN-5712 (*) | TCVN | vi
TIS-620 |  | th
VISCII |  |

Encoding

  The name given here is listed here is typically the canonical name for the encoding in the GNU C Library's iconv facility Encodings marked with (*) are not currently supported by the GNU C Library; for this reason, implementations may choose to ignore lines in desktop files that resolve to this encoding. Desktop files with these encodings are currently rare or non-existent.

Aliases

  Other names for the encoding found in existing desktop files.

Tags

  Language tags for which this is the default encoding.

This table above covers all tags and encodings that are known to be currently in use. Implementors may choose to support encodings not in the above set. For tags without defaults listed in the above table, desktop file creators must specify the ENCODING part of the locale tag.

Matching the ENCODING part of the locale tag against a locale name or alias should be done by stripping all punctuation characters from both the tag and the name or alias, converting both name and alias to lowercase, and comparing the result. This is necessary because, for example, "Big5" is frequently found instead of "BIG5" and "georgianacademy" instead of GEORGIAN-ACADEMY. Desktop files creators should, however, use the name as it appears in the "Encoding" column above.

Prev | Home |
Example Desktop Entry File |  |