Force Wave Dash

“Force WaveDash” is a plugin to canonicalize some Unicode characters:
to force “WAVE DASH” characters other than “FULLWIDTH TILD”.

Author:IKEDA Yuriko (profile at wordpress.org)
WordPress version required:2.0
WordPress version tested:2.9.2
Plugin version:1.0.0
Added to WordPress repository:04-01-2010
Last updated:22-01-2010
Warning! This plugin has not been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.
Rating, %:0
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Plugin URI:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/force-wav...
Total downloads:2 062
Active installs:90+
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日本語で読む

When using Unicode in Japanese, there is "WAVE DASH Problem", "FULLWIDTH HYPHEN Problem": a problem which similar-glyph but different-code-character are used in Unicode texts. Below are invalid (left) and prefered (right) pairs:

  • "～" U+FF5E FULLWIDTH TILD -> "〜" U+301C WAVE DASH
  • "―" U+2015 HORIZONTAL BAR -> "—" U+2014 EM DASH
  • "－" U+FF0D FULLWIDTH HYPHEN-MINUS -> "−" U+2212 MINUS SIGN
  • "￠" U+FFE0 FULLWIDTH CENT SIGN -> "¢" U+00A2 CENT SIGN
  • "￡" U+FFE1 FULLWIDTH POUND SIGN -> "£" U+00A3 POUND SIGN
  • "￢" U+FFE2 FULLWIDTH NOT SIGN -> "¬" U+00AC NOT SIGN

For example, the punctuation called wave dash "〜" is used for various purposes:

  • growing the end of the word (e.g. "え〜")
  • showing range between two words (e.g. "東京〜大阪")
  • decoration for a title (e.g. "〜〜波ダッシュとは〜〜")

But, the Unicode character sets has two different code for wave-shape characters. One is U+301C "〜" as "WAVE DASH", the other one is U+FF5E "～" as "FULLWIDTH TILD". Moreover, Microsoft Windows mainly uses U+FF5E, and other environments (such as Mac OS X, Linux, Perl, PHP, Java) mainly uses U+301C.

"WAVE DASH problem" is a phenomenon that different "wave-shape characters" are mixed in Unicode texts. For example, below cases will occur:

  1. A Mac OS X or Linux user have chance to borrow a Microsoft Windows computer to update the weblog, some FULLWIDTH TILD mixed!! (Because Windows uses FULLWIDTH TILD.)

  2. A Windows user who uses mainly FULLWIDTH TILD in his/her weblog, tried to post using mobile phone. Some WAVE DASH will be included. (Because converting the encoding ISO-2022-JP for Japanese mail messages into UTF-8 with PHP function "mb_convert_encoding" results WAVE DASH.)

This plugin tries to solve the problem by replacing all "FULLWIDTH TILD" characters into "WAVE DASH" ones in posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, blogroll (bookmarks), and etc when you create, edit, and show them.

The root cause is that Microsoft Windows uses "FULLWIDTH TILD" instead of "WAVE DASH". Better character code should be "WAVE DASH" because other environments uses it. This plugin canonicalize to use "WAVE DASH" by converting FULLWIDTH TILDs into them.

Also see below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_dash#Japanese

Below are Japanese articles: