The following definitions apply throughout this chapter:
A character set is a finite set of characters or glyphs without encoding.
Encoding is the process of uniquely identifying each character in a character set with a numeric code.
A coded character set is the set of numeric codes that represents a character set.
This chapter uses the term, “coded character set,” rather than “character set,” since conversion relies on encoding.
Character set conversion is the process of mapping characters in one coded character set to characters in another.
A direct conversion is a conversion from one coded character set to another. Adaptive Server and Open Server support direct conversion between character sets within the Western European and Japanese language groups.
An indirect conversion is a conversion from one coded character set to another by way of an intermediate coded character set.
Because indirect conversion allows any character set to be converted to any other character set, regardless of whether the character sets are in the same language group, it is sometimes called universal conversion.
