Re: Handling ID3 tags with non-latin1 encoding

On Jun 5, 2006, at 2:06 AM, Stefan Huelswitt wrote:
> I have a question regarding handling of ID3 tags which are non- 
> latin1 encoded e.g. iso-8859-5.
>
> I think I can get ucs4 strings from libid3tag and convert them with  
> iconv to whatever codeset originaly was used.
>
> How can I get information about the original codeset?

In ID3v2, the original text encoding is one of ISO-8859-1 (i.e.  
Latin-1), UTF-16, or UTF-8. You can find the encoding in the assigned  
field of the tag frame containing the string; usually it is the first  
field.

ID3v1 has no text encoding specification, so it is impossible to know  
what encoding was used; libid3tag assumes it is Latin-1 and  
translates this to UCS-4.

> Is there another designated way to handle these cases?

If you happen to know the encoding of an ID3v1 tag is something other  
than Latin-1, you can translate it from UCS-4 back to Latin-1, then  
re-interpret it however you like.

-- 
Rob Leslie
[email protected]