Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Internationalizing Applications

> ## Why OpenEdge uses word-break tables

> OpenEdge uses word-break tables for the following reasons:

> - Word-break tables are required by word indexing, which accelerates the processing of queries that use the `CONTAINS` operator.

> Consider the preceding examples. To process such queries quickly, OpenEdge must quickly find the database records that contain the words of the target string (for example, “credit” and “hold”). To accelerate its searching, OpenEdge uses word indexes. But before word indexes can be used, they must be built. To build them, OpenEdge breaks each database field to be word indexed into separate words. To do this correctly, OpenEdge needs to know which characters in the field act as word delimiters. This is the information word-break tables provide.

> - Different locales can have different word-break conventions. For example, the character “!” might be a word-delimiter in one language and part of a word in another language.

> - Different applications can have different word-break conventions. For example, an inventory application that uses part numbers might use the characters “@” and “.” as word delimiters that separate the different components of the part number (factory, floor, bin, assembly, subassembly, and so on), while an e-mail application might consider these characters to be parts of words—in this case, e-mail addresses.

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