FreeTDS Development Group

[Steve Langasek <vorlon AT netexpress.net>]

Hi Nick,

On Sat, 9 Jun 2001, Nick Gorham wrote:

> > "Don't break anything" certainly applies to existing APIs that are 
> > defined to
> > return (char *).  Are there other APIs defined (perhaps by Microsoft) that
> > will return UCS2 (or wchar_t *)?  If not, perhaps FreeTDS should be 
> > leading
> > the way...

> The ODBC 3.51 Unicode API uses UCS2.

> The MS SQL Server ODBC driver only deals with UCS2 Unicode, and leaves it to
> the driver manager to convert to 8 bit for non unicode apps. AFAIK it does
> this by loosing the 8 MSB's

This is all very reasonable.  It doesn't provide us with any hints about how
to best provide UCS2 APIs at a lower level (ctlib/dblib), unfortunately.  Apps
such as sqsh, DBD::Sybase, and php-mssql can't benefit from ODBC APIs; and
unless we have a wchar_t API in one of these lower-level libraries, we'll
still be doing an unnecessary double-conversion to provide UCS2 to any ODBC
apps.  So if neither Microsoft nor Sybase currently has a set of dblib or
ctlib functions that return UCS2 strings, I think it does fall upon us to
devise such an API. :)

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer