FreeTDS Development Group

[Brian Bruns <camber AT ais.org>]

Thanks James,

That was very insightful. I think we have three major issues here:

1) TDS 7/8.  Everything is unicode, so we should just be able to read the
field in freetds.conf and use iconv to convert between UCS2 and
that.  If there is no entry in freetds.conf, we could try to grab the
value of $LANG, although I'm not sure how that maps to the iconv
labels. Failing there we simply use the present 7bit ASCII conversion

2) TDS 4.2/5. This gets a little complicated as FreeTDS needs to
communicate to the server what character set to use.  Problem is the label
for this (iso_1, cp850) are not the same as the iconv labels (do
a iconv --list to see them). I would suggest we create a 'charset.map'
file to map sybase style charset names to the iconv ones, perhaps also
dealing with $LANG similarly.  Sybase does something similar with the
locales.dat file.

3) multibyte char sets.  I'm afraid I just don't know enough about usage
of these to make a good attempt at it.  We'll shelve it until a native
user comes along. ;-)

Brian

On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, James K. Lowden wrote:

> All, 
> 
> For those whose eyes didn't glaze over when last we talked about Greek
> characters and UTF-8 and Unicode and etc., I'm forwarding a message from
> my friend Michael, who was born in Greece and is much too smart for his
> own good.  
> 
> I don't remember how our discussion was resolved, or even if indeed it
> had a useful conclusion, but I found Michael's explication helpful.  I
> hope you do, too.  
> 
> --jkl
>