Justin,

> I have made a database with a default character set of UNICODE_FSS.
> I have used TIB_Query to do the reads, updates and inserts.
> I have tried using IB_Edit to display the data, but I fear that it
> does not correctly handle the Japanese characters when entered. It
> handles the English characters OK.
> I tried using data-unaware controls and manually writing data to and
> from the database (using ->AsWideString), but the data that was
> entered only gets displayed as ??? chars.
> [...]
> Is specifying the database character set of UNICODE_FSS the wise thing
> to do?

Unicode support is a lot better in Firebird 2.0 and later, so if you
have any chance to use 2.0 or 2.1, go for that.

The important thing to look at is the *Client* Character Set that you
specify for the connection. When you use e.g. ISO8859_1 for that, the
Unicode characters for Japanese will get transformed to ? or whatever.

You should use UNICODE_FSS also as the client character set and be
prepared to handle strings as UTF-8 strings then.

If you can use Firebird 2, then UTF8 is the character set to use
(because UNICODE_FSS is outdated and buggy).

There is what I consider a bug in the current IBO version 4.8.7 that
translates incoming Unicode to the local character set when you use
UTF8 as the Client character set, I will again write to Jason to see
what we can do.


Best Regards

Stefan