# Supporting new or Updating languages #

We generate statistical language data using Wikipedia as natural
language text resource.

Right now, we have automated scripts only to generate statistical data
for single-byte encodings. Multi-byte encodings usually requires more
in-depth knowledge of its specification.

## New single-byte encoding ##

Uchardet uses language data, and therefore rather than supporting a
charset, we in fact support a couple (language, charset). So for
instance if uchardet supports (French, ISO-8859-15), it should be able
to recognize French text encoded in ISO-8859-15, but may fail at
detecting ISO-8859-15 for non-supported languages.

This is why, though less flexible, it also makes uchardet much more
accurate than other detection system, as well as making it an efficient
language recognition system.
Since many single-byte charsets actually share the same layout (or very
similar ones), it is actually impossible to have an accurate single-byte
encoding detector for random text.

Therefore you need to describe the language and the codepoint layouts of
every charset you want to add support for.

I recommend having a look at langs/fr.py which is heavily commented as
a base of a new language description, and charsets/windows-1252.py as a
base for a new charset layout (note that charset layouts can be shared
between languages. If yours is already there, you have nothing to do).
The important name in the charset file are:

- `name`: an iconv-compatible name.
- `charmap`: fill it with CTR (control character), SYM (symbol), NUM
             (number), LET (letter), ILL (illegal codepoint).

## Tools ##

You must install Python 3 and the [`Wikipedia` Python
tool](https://github.com/goldsmith/Wikipedia).

## Run script ##

Let's say you added (or modified) support for French (`fr`), run:

> ./BuildLangModel.py fr --max-page=100 --max-depth=4

The options can be changed to any value. Bigger values mean the script
will process more data, so more processing time now, but uchardet may
possibly be more accurate in the end.

## Updating core code ##

If you were only updating data for a language model, you have nothing
else to do. Just build `uchardet` again and test it.

If you were creating new models though, you will have to add these in
src/nsSBCSGroupProber.cpp and src/nsSBCharSetProber.h, and increase the
value of `NUM_OF_SBCS_PROBERS` in src/nsSBCSGroupProber.h.
Finally add the new file in src/CMakeLists.txt.

I will be looking to make this step more straightforward in the future.