FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT speakeasy.org>]

Steve Langasek wrote:

> 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!

According to
http://www.gnu.org/manual/glibc-2.2.3/html_node/libc_84.html
'iconv' is implemented by GNU Libc.

>
> 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?

Brian,

When I saw Niky Riga's clear answer, I knew it would take you to bail me out. 
;-)

Rather than tackling unicode -> ascii conversion (which will break down as 
soon as
you run out of bits), I *think* Steve's suggestion would be the most direct 
path to
unmangled Unicode transportation.  A clean 16-bit pipe, IOW.  From what their
documentation says, that would make PHP happy, too.

Steve, what would it mean for FreeTDS to "support CJK languages"?  Isn't it 
enough to
ferry the data back and forth?

--jkl