FreeTDS Development Group

[Bob Kline <bkline AT rksystems.com>]

On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Brian Bruns wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> The unicode -> ascii conversion that is present in FreeTDS is *very*
> simple and is not internationalized at all.  (Note: I am a english
> speaking american with all the bad conotations that brings with it).  
> So, like many things in FreeTDS, I have never added it because 1) I
> haven't needed it personally and 2) Nobody needing it has dedicated
> enough time to solving it.
> 
> I'd be happy to put in a solution for mapping unicode, but I don't
> have the foggiest notion what is required or how to do it.  Is there
> a standard for converting unicode to national character sets? Is
> free software (read: something compatible with LGPL) available that
> will do this?  If not, we have to roll our own.  And I have no
> experience with multibyte character sets (big5 etc..) so how to deal
> with those is a mystery to me as well.

This is one area where the JDBC driver is a bit ahead of the C
libraries, so you may want to peek at the source code for the driver to
see what some of the issues and approaches are.  Unfortunately
(fortunately, from other angles), you'll see that some of the conversion
work is done by Java for us, but I believe there are some open-source
packages out there that might help you out (take a look at the IBM icu
package that's plugged into the Xerces XML parser, for example).

-- 
Bob Kline
mailto:bkline AT rksystems.com
http://www.rksystems.com