FreeTDS Development Group

[Steve Langasek <vorlon AT netexpress.net>]

On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Brian Bruns wrote:

> 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!

My personal preference (speaking as a polyglot) would be for FreeTDS to return
text to the application *in Unicode format*, either as wchars or as UTF-8.  If
there are some existing APIs that specify regional 8-bit charsets, then it
does make sense to support that, but I would rather see efforts focused on
giving Unix apps access to the full 16-bit character space.

In particular, I would like it if PHP could pull UTF8 strings out of FreeTDS,
because by and large, I could then push those straight out to the web browser
(having set the appropriate charset header) without any unnecessary
conversions.

UTF8 doesn't help CJK languages, of course.  Does TDS7.0 even support those
languages, though?

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer