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| <title>Data Sources Character Sets - Functional Spec</title> |
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| <div style="text-align: center;"><font size="+3"><span |
| style="font-weight: bold;">Data Sources Character Sets<br> |
| <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><font |
| size="+1">Functional Specification<br> |
| </font></span></span></span></font> |
| <div style="text-align: left;"> |
| <h2>Content</h2> |
| <div style="margin-left: 40px;"><a href="#abstract">Abstract<br> |
| </a><a href="#functional">Functional Description</a><br> |
| </div> |
| <h2><a name="abstract"></a>Abstract</h2> |
| OpenOffice.org, Unicode-enabled itself, allows to access non-Unicode |
| (8-Bit) databases. Thus when transfering string data from connections |
| to such databases, OOo must convert the data into UniCode. For this, |
| the user can specify which character set to use for this conversion.<br> |
| <h2><a name="functional"></a>Functional Description</h2> |
| <ul> |
| <li> |
| <p><font face="arial, sans-serif" size="2">Character sets are |
| specified per data source. This means that in the data source |
| administration dialog, there is an option where the user chooses |
| a character set to use for every connection created for a data |
| source.</font></p> |
| </li> |
| <li> |
| <p><font face="arial, sans-serif" size="2">The Character Sets |
| setting is available for the following data source types: Adabas, |
| ODBC, dBase, Text, MySQL (when adapted via ODBC, see the <a |
| href="../specifications/MySQL_data_source_page.html">MySQL |
| spec</a>)</font></p> |
| </li> |
| <li> |
| <p><font size="2" face="arial, sans-serif">In general (with on |
| exception, see below), only character sets which are part of the |
| respective <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets">IANA-standard</a> |
| can be supported by StarOffice. The reason for this is that |
| character sets need to be transported via UNO, and instead of |
| defining an own standard for naming them, we decided to use the |
| most comprehensive standard available - IANA.</font></p> |
| </li> |
| <li> |
| <p><font face="arial, sans-serif" size="2">OpenOffice.org |
| versions up to 1.0.x supported only a very limited set of |
| character sets, namely windows-1252, macintosh, IBMPC 437, |
| ~850,~860,~861,~863,~865,~866, UTF-8 and Big5-HKSCS.</font></p> |
| </li> |
| </ul> |
| |
| <ul> |
| <p>Since OpenOffice.org 1.1, this list has been extended. For |
| compatibility reasons, the encodings above form the very minimal |
| set of required encodings.</p> |
| <p><font face="arial, sans-serif" size="2"><i>Nowadays, OOo data |
| sources support every encoding which is known to OOo in general, |
| and which is a valid IANA name. This list is much too large to cite |
| it here completely, and it can be extended in the future without |
| further notice.</i></font></p> |
| <li> |
| <p style="font-style: normal;"><font face="arial, sans-serif" |
| size="2">The display names of the character sets are the usual |
| names as used in other places, too (for instance |
| "Tools/Options/Load/Save/HTML compatibility/Character Set").</font></p> |
| </li> |
| <li> |
| <p style="font-style: normal;"><font face="arial, sans-serif" |
| size="2">There is one "virtual" character set named "System". |
| Choosing this just means that the current system character set is |
| used, so the user does not need to care for an explicit setting. |
| This is the default when creating new data sources. For Text and |
| dBase data sources, all text encodings which do not have a |
| constant character size are forbidden. For instance, UTF-8 uses a |
| different number of bytes to code different characters – thus |
| UTF-8 and all character sets with the same characteristics are not |
| allowed for dBase and Text.</font></p> |
| </li> |
| <li> |
| <p style="font-style: normal;"><font face="arial, sans-serif" |
| size="2">Consider a character set which, in the current |
| environment or for the current data source type, is not available. |
| First, this means that the list box for selecting the character sets |
| does not display it. If, however, the user changed the character set |
| for a data source by other means than our UI, then we fallback to |
| “System encoding”, means instead of the invalid encoding |
| “System” is displayed.</font></p> |
| </li> |
| </ul> |
| <font size="+3"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span |
| style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span></span></font><br> |
| <hr style="width: 100%; height: 1px;">Author: <a |
| href="mailto:fs@openoffice.org">Frank Schönheit</a><br> |
| Last Modified: $Date: 2003/07/08 07:21:39 $<br> |
| <span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright © 2001-2003 |
| OpenOffice.org</span><font size="+3"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span |
| style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span></span></font></div> |
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