About Unicode

[Former Member]

Hai all,

Now iam working on upgradation project. iam new to upgradation. we are upgrading 4.7e to ecc6.0.And what is the unicode. What is the need of Unicode in upgradation. And Give me a suggestion on unicode.

Thanks in Advance.

[Former Member]

Hi Mohan,

Unicode is a universal code page which allows you to run all supported languages with the same encoding. Usually SAP run different languages with different code pages. In the old days this means that you needed different application servers. Nowadays it only means, that you could not read all data with other tools than the SAP application server. When you run Unicode than also the database content is stored in Unicode and you can read all your data not only with help of the SAP application server.

To find more information about Unicode in the SAP environment, please have a look at

[Unicode@SAP|http://service.sap.com/Unicode@SAP].

Best regards

Ralph

[Former Member]

Unicode supports almost all the languages.

if you are converting your SAP system from non unicode to unicode there are high chances that many of your programs give hard errors in unicode environment.

To see what errors you might get, u have to run the T-Code UCCHECK .It displays all the errors and warnings.

Then u can changes the code accordingly.

Example: if you were using download function module in non unicode system, it will not work in unicode system, u need to convert it into GUI_DOWNLOAD.

[Former Member]

Hi,

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What is Unicode?

 Unicode is a universal encoded character set that allows you to store information from any language using a single character set.

 Unicode provides a unique code for every character, independent platform, program or language.

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Unicode Encoding

u2022 UTF-8 Encoding

 This is a 8 bit encoding

 It is a variable width multi-byte encoding

 One Unicode character can be 1 bye, 2 bytes or 3 bytes

u2022 UTF-16 Encoding

 This is the 16 bit encoding

 One Unicode character is 2 bytes

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Advantages of Unicode compliance

Although the conversion effort for the R/3 kernel and applications is considerable, the migration to Unicode provides great benefits in the long run:

u2022 The Internet and consequently also mySAP.com are entirely based on Unicode, which thus is a basic requirement for international competitiveness.

u2022 Unicode allows all R/3 users to install a central R/3 System that covers all business processes worldwide.

u2022 Companies using different distributed systems frequently want to aggregate their worldwide corporate data. Without Unicode, they would be able to do this only to a limited degree.

u2022 With Unicode, you can use multiple languages simultaneously at a single front end computer.

u2022 Unicode is required for cross-application data exchange without loss of data due to incompatible character sets. One way to present documents in the World Wide Web (www) is XML, for example.

In addition, if new characters are added to the Unicode character set, SAP can decide whether to represent these characters internally using 2 or 4 bytes.

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Hope it will help

Regards,

Syed

[Former Member]

Hi Mohan

good link for unicode documentation

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/79/c554d3b3dc11d5993800508b6b8b11/frameset.htm

Regards,

Syf