Unicode Conversions

Unicode conversions exists for all native character sets. When converting between two native character sets, Unicode conversion uses Unicode as an intermediate character set.

For example, to convert between the server default character set (CP 437), and the client character set (CP 860), CP 437 is first converted to Unicode; Unicode is then converted to CP 860.

Unicode conversions may be used either when the default character set of the server is UTF-8, or a native character set. You must specifically configure your server to use Unicode conversions (unless the server’s default character set is UTF-8).

Earlier versions of SAP ASE used direct conversions, and it is the default method for character set conversions. However, Unicode conversions allow easier and less complex character set conversion. While SAP ASE direct conversions are still supported, SAP now also uses Unicode conversions to provide complete conversion support for all character sets and has no plans to add new direct conversions.

• 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).