On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 21:54 +0000, willie_juson wrote:

>
>
> --- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, David Johnson
> <d_johnson@c...> wrote:
> > asp.net and c# would have the same issue as Delphi with unicode,
> since
> > the problem is that the Windows native character set that all three
> > products are married to is not wide enough to represent the full
> unicode
> > code space. Many Chinese characters are beyond the end of the two
> byte
> > code space allowed in UCS2.
>
> mmmm, maybe I was just lucky with the chinese characters I picked but
> I managed to achieve this relatively easily with a MS SQL 2000
> database and Delphi. I basically duplicated the components on my form
> and changed only the ADOConnection/ADOQuery on the "server tier" of
> the application and could quite happily save and retrieve some
> chinese I got off BabelFish. This led me to the conclusion that
> either the db-connection/query (IBX) wasn't supporting unicode or my
> database implementation itself wasn't.
>

Firebird has known issues with unicode support. Those are being
addressed by the intl branch. Others will have a far better idea than I
do of their status.

>
> >
> > When you define the character set to NONE, the engine is agnostic
> > towards the contents of the strings supplied. Corollary is that the
> > application layer is fully responsible for the byte management of
> the
> > stored/retrieved strings.
> >
> > To support both English and Chinese well in the same database you
> will
> > need to move to an environment that natively supports a complete
> unicode
> > representation (UTF-8, UTF-32).
> This sounds like what I want, I currently only need to support
> English/Chinese, but hopefully I've designed it so that adding extra
> languages in the future will be relatively simple (yeah right).
> Having an "agnostic" database would fit ideally with this. If only I
> could get it to work....

Good luck.

There were other reasons that I abandoned Delphi about a year back and
haven't looked back. You may want to look closely at Java.

>
> The comments later in this thread about regulations in China are
> interesting - I wonder if they apply to Taiwan?

I don't think so - not until China invades.