Hello Milan,

>>>> When connecting with a Delphi 2009 Unicode enabled Firebird
>>>> connectivity set (connection charset becomes unicode_fss), on
>>>> a certain database with no charset defined, I get the infamous
>>>> "cannot transliterate character between character sets" error.
>>>>
>>>> Why can't a character be converted to Unicode?
>>>>
>>>> Anything specific here?
>>> It's the other way round: converting Unicode characters passing from
>>> the
>>> client to columns of charset NONE. Outside the 7-bit ansi range, in
>>> charset NONE there is nothing to transliterate your Unicode characters
>>> to.
>>
>> Well, the error is raised on retrieval of data :-)
>
> Hi Martijn,
>
> the problem is that the engine does not know which character set to
> convert it from. It only sees a bunch of bytes. Same bytes could be
> different characters in, say WIN1252 or WIN1250 code page. So, it cannot
> turn it into Unicode character, because it does not know which character
> it really is.
>
> This is general problem with NONE, which I call "garbage in, garbage
> out" charset, because it is completely unaware of characters and you
> cannot use any function that is character based (UPPER, CHAR_LENGTH,
> etc.) reliably, because it would only work properly with ASCII set.
>
> In short, if you absolutely have to deal with NONE, that use NONE to
> connect to database and have the client deal with actual characters.
> Please note that this means that ALL clients must work the same way.
>
> It is much better not to use NONE at all, and use some real character
> set which can then be transliterated. Then you can have some clients
> (say, a Delphi app) connecting with UNICODE_FSS, others (say Java app)
> with UTF-8, etc. and everything would work fine.

I kinda figured as much... the problem is that with the component set I'm
using,
I was setting it to "UseUnicode = True", but then it always uses Unicode_FSS
as the client charset, which seems to work fine -unless- there is no db
charset.

Guess this is one of those corner cases...

With regards,

Martijn Tonies
Upscene Productions
http://www.upscene.com

Download Database Workbench for Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase SQL
Anywhere, MySQL, InterBase, NexusDB and Firebird!

Database questions? Check the forum:
http://www.databasedevelopmentforum.com