Using Multibyte Character Sets

In multibyte character sets, a wider range of characters is available for use in identifiers. For example, on a server with the Japanese language installed, the following types of characters may be used as the first character of an identifier: Zenkaku or Hankaku Katakana, Hiragana, Kanji, Romaji, Greek, Cyrillic, or ASCII.

Although Hankaku Katakana characters are legal in identifiers on Japanese systems, they are not recommended for use in heterogeneous systems. These characters cannot be converted between the EUC-JIS and Shift-JIS character sets.

The same is true for some 8-bit European characters. For example, the OE ligature, is part of the Macintosh character set (codepoint 0xCE). This character does not exist in the ISO 8859-1 (iso_1) character set. If the OE ligature exists in data being converted from the Macintosh to the ISO 8859-1 character set, it causes a conversion error.

If an object identifier contains a character that cannot be converted, the client loses direct access to that object.