FreeTDS Development Group

[Brian Bruns <camber AT ais.org>]

A quick google search turns up 'iconv', which is apparently a UNIX 98
standard of sorts. I'm curious how many unices actually support it. Linux
does.  and there is a libiconv for platforms that don't which is
LGPL.  Anybody else want to ring in with whether their platform supports
it?  It seems like it'd be a no brainer to implement...probably need the
new freetds.conf though to be able to configure it ;-) Two birds one
stone!

Brian

On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Bob Kline wrote:

> 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).
> 
>