Converting gb2312 to utf-8

Is it just a matter of flicking the switch?

[rjohara]

Character encoding issues still make my head spin sometimes, so pardon me if this is a confused question.

I have a Chinese introductory page to one of my sites that is gb2312-encoded. I'd like to change this to Unicode. (I'm going to save the old file, in case I decide to switch back.)

For Roman alphabet pages, I know that iso-8859-1 is a subset of utf-8, so to change from iso-8859-1 to utf-8 I just have to replace:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

with:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

and I'm done. Can I do the same for gb2312? Just replace:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=gb2312" />

with:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

and I'm done? (gb2312 being a subset of utf-8?)

[rjohara]

<bump>

I should have mentioned that I'm using BBEdit on a Mac - perhaps I should post in the Mac forum, but I thought this might be the better place for people familiar with encoding issues.

[worldmaster]

Why do you want to change to Unicode? GB is for Chinese mainland audience. Those who read Chinese simpified all have their browsers equipped with decoding tools.

[a2ztranslate]

I use an app called Pepper, it works fine converting between character sets. all you have to is open the file, then convert to UTF8, and it will convert the character encoding for you.

[Woz]

Sounds good a2ztranslate, got a URL for it?

Onya
Woz