Data errors/changes in unicode database Once all code is unicode compliant

[Former Member]

Hi All,

This is regarding unicode project.

We have currently made all the programs unicode complaint

and the database we are using is not unicode database.

We are moving now the entire code to the Unicode database system.

1>Could anyone tell what kind of data errors that might be encountered due to this new database system.

2>What kind of data changes regarding the format/data we might observe in the output files generated.

Any expertise and experiences in the similar upgradation will be very helpful..

Thank you all in advance

[Former Member]

Hi Kumar,

if you transport your unicode compliant reports to a unicode system, there will be no error which wont be there in a non-unicode system. Why should there be an error. The same for your second question. Why should there be a difference between an unicode and a non-unicode output beside the fact that output is now unicode encoded instead of one of the standard SAP code pages. Files will look completely normal when you use an editor which is able to work with unicode. An example is Microsoft Word or Notepad on a newer Windows release.

Regards

Ralph

[Former Member]

Ralph,

Will the Character size that is two bytes/4 bytes now in case of unicode system would bring the difference in Unicode system

Thank you

[Former Member]

Hi Kumar,

sorry but I don't understand your question.

You seem to run a multi byte code page yet, this will be the same in Unicode. But in Unicode it depends on the systems default code page how big a character will be in a file. If you use UCS-2 encoding, all characters are two bytes long (afaik). In UTF-8 a character could be between one and four bytes long. But your applications should show both encoding as the same character.

Regards

Ralph

[Former Member]

Hi Ralph,

Could you please explain what is the code page .

Till now i was i assumption that each language would have a code page which has the all the characters used by it and thus denotes number of bytes used for each character..

Could you explain what is code page and how it is used in real time scenario...

Thank you..

[Former Member]

Hi Kumar,

each code page encodes characters into a binary representation. ASCII is may be the best known. It encode 128 characters with seven bits. The first 32 characters are control characters for printers and terminals like carriage return and bell. Then there are some special characters like Space and Comma followed by digits and the characters of the roman alphabet in upper case and lower case representation. Unicode is another code page which is defined in unicode standard documentation. Because unicode characters are wider than one byte (the current standard contains almost 100.000 characters) there are different encoding used in applications. The most used encoding is probably UTF-8 which is used by DB2 and Oracle. MaxDB uses UTF-16 which uses much more space for most used characters. Languages use characters from a code page to build words. You may have multiple code pages in one system (MDMP) or a unicode system which supports all languages on a single code page.

I hope this help you to understand the difference between a code page and a language. May be you check out the links [http://www.asciitable.com|http://www.asciitable.com] and [http://unicode.org|http://unicode.org].

Best regards

Ralph

[Former Member]

thanks ralph..

i shall further investigate on code page...

But we are currently facing other problem..

That is interpreting of the special characters in unicode and non unicode system....