<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="content-type"
 content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
  <title>Data Sources Character Sets - Functional Spec</title>
</head>
<body>
<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 &#8211; 				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
				&#8220;System encoding&#8221;, means instead of the invalid 				encoding
&#8220;System&#8221; 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 			Sch&ouml;nheit</a><br>
Last Modified: $Date: 2003/07/08 07:21:39 $<br>
<span style="font-style: italic;">Copyright &COPY; 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>
</div>
</body>
</html>