Allowing Unicode noncharacters

In versions of SAP ASE earlier than 15.7, the unichar, univarchar, unitext, char, varchar, and text datatypes under the utf-8 default character set did not accept Unicode noncharacters (code points are permanently reserved for internal use).

SAP ASE versions 15.7 and later allows you to ignore Unicode noncharacters by enabling the enable functionaliry group or the enable permissive unicode configuration parameters.

If you do not enable this feature, SAP ASE rejects these noncharacters as in earlier versions.

For more information about the Unicode standard, see the Unicode Consortium Web site.

When you enable this feature, Unicode noncharacters are not detected in:

In addition, Unicode noncharacters are acceptable in simple expressions such as comparisons, where they sort higher than legal Unicode characters.

You can use Unicode noncharacters as parameters to these functions:

ascii()

lower()

sortkey()

char_length()

ltrim()

soundex()

charindex()

patindex()

str_replace()

compare()

replicate()

stuff()

datalength()

reverse()

substring()

difference()

right()

upper()

left()

rtrim()

uscalar()

len()

 
Note: This feature does not affect UTF-16 surrogate handling enabled with the enable surrogate handling configuration parameter. See System Administration Guide > Setting Configuration Parameters.