Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Internationalizing Applications

Using Unicode

When you adapt an application to a different locale, the character set often changes. One way to deal with multiple character sets is to use multiple code pages, one for each language or group of languages. However, this approach forces you to deal with code-page conversion and code-page incompatibility, explained in Chapter 2 "Understanding Code Pages" and Chapter 8, " Using Multi-byte Code Pages." Another approach is to use a single code page that includes all characters of all languages of the world. This is the idea behind Unicode, which is the focus of this chapter.

This chapter includes the following sections:

Unicode overview
Why use Unicode
Using Unicode with OpenEdge products
Using Unicode with OpenEdge databases
Using Unicode with OpenEdge applications
Guidelines for using Unicode
Unicode support for supplementary characters