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List:       freetds
Subject:    [freetds] Re: Unicode
From:       Steve Langasek <vorlon () netexpress ! net>
Date:       2001-06-08 18:45:46
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On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Lowden, James K wrote:

> Two native Chinese speakers in my office (Bejing and Shanghai) did not
> mention these issues; Unicode meets their day-to-day needs.  Their
> complaints have more to do with the variety of encoding schemes and the
> inadequacy of internationalization of most applications.  I say this not to
> defend anything (or offend anyone), just to say that maybe Unicode is a
> little like Windows 98: it meets a need pretty well if you don't press too
> hard.

Correct -- Unicode is sufficient for the day-to-day needs of most Chinese
computer users.  It's not sufficient for the Chinese civilization as a whole.
:)

> I think it also points to the need to be able to query the database for its
> encoding system?

With TDS 7.0 this is already done, or else the only available wire coding
supported by the protocol is UCS2.  The latter is not out of the question,
since UCS2 is the only thing available for most Microsoft-sanctioned
protocols.


> There are all kinds of crazy ramifications to embracing any non-ascii
> system, as I'm sure you know.  Little things, like: a filesystem can be very
> surprised to see a 0x2f as part of a filename because they "know" 0x2f is
> '/'.  Oh boy.  This is an area where as far as I can tell NT is way out in
> front.  NTFS isn't bothered by Unicode.

The CLI shells and the filesystems are two different beasts.  Because ext2
uses free-form, null-terminated strings for filenames (slashes are used by the
shell to indicate heirarchy, but are not encoded in the filesystem itself),
Linux can already accomodate UTF-8 filenames quite well.  You just have to
worry about escaping characters in your filenames when you type them in at the
bash prompt, but any shell is going to have to contend with that issue in some
manner or other.

NT, of course, is UCS-2 through-and-through; since the standard Win32 APIs
deal in Unicode, applications already expect it, and there's no need to resort
to UTF-8 on the filesystem or elsewhere.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer


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