Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Asian Characters and UTF-8 Encoding - Any experiences?

That sounds excellent. To conclude your statement: There is no other nasty issue with double-byte characters (like: Oracle driver implementation, screwed AOLServer implementation, ...) except for the Oracle charset.

And yes, our default Oracle charset is still US7ASCII, following a recomendation of Philip of around 1999...

Bests,
Frank

The fact is that at least through Oracle 8.1.7.x, ASCII7 is the default. Oracle also stupidly hides this in their installer, so unless you specifically look for it when installing Oracle, you will almost certainly end up with with an ASCI7 rather than UTF8 database - bad. My old outdated Oracle install notes have some more info on that UTF8 character set stuff.

thanks a lot for your comment. May I ask you why you are using different encodings for Russian and Chinese?

Bests,
Frank

ns_section ns/parameters
   ns_param OutputCharset iso-8859-1
   ns_param HackContentType 1

ns_section ns/MimeTypes
   set mime_plain {text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1}
   set mime_html  {text/html; charset=iso-8859-1}

   # See also "http://dqd.com/~mayoff/encoding-doc.html" for advice on
   # character sets and MIME types in AOLserver.

   ns_param Default     $mime_plain
   ns_param NoExtension $mime_plain
   ns_param .txt  $mime_plain
   ns_param .text $mime_plain
   ns_param .htm  $mime_html
   ns_param .html $mime_html

That's what I use in AOLserver 4.0.10, but note that I am purposely serving only iso-8859-1 content. If you are trying to serve UTF-8, some of the settings above would probably break stuff for you.

Well I was searching for Unicode to Arabic conversions and came across this post.

What I am trying to do is convert some unicode data that I have into Arabic, there is a function written that does the conversion using a sequence of Case stmts and it searches for the unicode chars and then replaces it with the corresponding Arabic character.

e.g. IF strT = '067E' THEN Dest := Dest || Chr(129 USING NCHAR_CS); --129Arabic Peh

Well the function works correctly in Oracle 9i and above but refuses to compile in versions of Oracle below 9i.

Here are some more details:
Oracle Version: Oracle 8.1.7
Compilation error: PLS 00561- Characterset mismatch on value for parameter 'Right'.

I am assuming it is the Nchar_cs that creates the problem.

Would appreciate any help on this. Thx in Advance

Regards
Chetz