--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, David Johnson
<d_johnson@c...> wrote:

> Recent reviews on this and the Firebird-architect list have

concluded

> that the Unicode FSS support is based on an early version of the

unicode

> specification that does not match the final documentation, and does

not

> reflect any supported standard.
>
> I had poor luck saving unicode from Delphi. Others may have had

more

> success. The Delphi (UCS2) widestring does not support enough code
> points to handle the full Unicode specification.
>
> However, I have been able to verify that Firebird will correctly

store

> and retrieve unicode UTF-8 characters from Java using the jaybird

JDBC

> driver, provided the character set of the database/column is set to
> none. The caveats are that your column size is a byte size, not a
> character size, and that only byte order collation is meaningful

from

> the database. I used arabic, chinese, tibetan, english, and french
> strings to verify this.
>
> On display, if the target system does not have a font configured to
> represent a code point in the string, the data will be displayed

as ?'s.

> Internally, however, it is still represented by the appropriate byte
> code sequences.
>
> Hope this helps!
>
> On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 12:49 +0000, willie_juson wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > I am writing an ASP.Net app with a Firebird backend database. It
> > requires multi language (Chinese/English initially) support.

Could I

> > please get some guidelines on how to store/retrieve chinese

(simple)

> > characters from a database table. To get an understanding of it

I've

> > been trying via a Delphi 7 app to populate the table using

TntWare data

> > aware controls plus IBConnection/IBQuery/TClientDataset data

controls.

> > I can't get it to save chinese characters, as soon as I "post" a

record

> > the chinese character become "?"s.

Thanks David that's a good start, I'll stop banging my head against
the wall with Delphi and try a different approach.

Maybe via an asp.net page/c#. I'll just make sure I've got this
right though - I need to define the field(s) in the table(s) as
having no character set - NONE ?

again thanks for the feedback.