Character set conversion allows clients and servers that use different coded character sets to communicate.
At the present time in Sybase systems, automatic character set conversion occurs only on the server. Adaptive Server and Open Server support direct coded character set conversion between character sets in the Western European and Japanese language groups. These are the only direct character set conversions that Adaptive Server and Open Server support. However, Open Server does support the conversion of any Sybase-supported character set to or from the Unicode character set in UTF-8 form. This allows Open Server to perform an indirect conversion (charset_1 to Unicode to charset_2) between any two Sybase character sets.
The Unicode standard (equivalent to ISO 10646 standard) is an international character set. Unicode has the capacity to encode virtually all characters used in the world’s major written languages.
UTF-8 is a multibyte variable length encoding of Unicode that is compatible with stream-based applications. It is recommended for data exchange and storage by X/Open, POSIX, and X11 standards.
