Hi Brad,

>>I'm sorry for abusing this list with that topic, but possibly someone
>>has an answer. ;-)
>>
>>Many DBMS claim to support Unicode and hereby quite a lot of different
>>terms appear. UTF-8, UCS16, UCS32, UCS-2 (or is it UCS2?), UTF-16, ...
>>
>>I do have basic knowledge about Unicode, but I get confused by UCS16,
>>UCS2, UTF-16 and so on. Do they mean the same? For example, is UTF-16
>>and UCS-2 (UCS2?) the same? Or is one an enhancement of the other?
>>
>>If anybody knows a good compact online reference on the differences, I
>>will owe you a drink at the next Firebird Conference. ;-)
>
>
> I find this a good link to the whole thing:
>
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
>
> Basically you have UCS (Universal Character Set) which is ISO standard
> 10646 and then you have Unicode which was developed by a consortium of
> mostly US companies. The two groups realized that two different
> universal character sets was not a good idea so they made their
> standards compatible and equivalent though they are still published
> separately. The Unicode standard has more info on how to draw the
> characters and how to handle sorting and comparisons while the ISO is
> just a character mapping.
>
> Originally the character set space was setup to be 31 bits though both
> standard have agreed to stick to only using 21 bits now. There are lots
> of options in encoding these characters into bytes and thats what all
> the UCS-2, UCS-4, UTF-8, UTF-16, ... are about. The link above should
> explain how at least some of these encodings work and their pro's and con's.
>
> Hope this helps! Here is another link in case the above didn't cover
> everything...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

Both are excellent readings, especially the first one. Thanks a lot! So,
will you attend the next Firebird conference (you know, regarding the
drink)? ;-)


Regards,
Thomas