Application Development Discussions
Join the discussions or start your own on all things application development, including tools and APIs, programming models, and keeping your skills sharp.
cancel
Turn on suggestions
Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type.
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

unicode

Former Member

‎10-11-2007 2:24 PM

0 Kudos

what is unicode.

can any body send some brief introduction of this .

2 REPLIES 2

Former Member

‎10-11-2007 2:28 PM

0 Kudos

Hi,

In the past, SAP developers used various codes to encode characters of different alphabets, for example, ASCII, EBCDI, or double-byte code pages.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) encodes each character using 1 byte = 8 bit. This makes it possible to represent a maximum of 28 = 256 characters to which the combinations [00000000, 11111111] are assigned. Common code pages are, for example, ISO88591 for West European or ISO88595 for Cyrillic fonts.

EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange) also uses 1 byte to encode each character, which again makes it possible to represent 256 characters. EBCDIC 0697/0500 is an old IBM format that is used on AS/400 machines for West European fonts, for example.

Double-byte code pages require 1 or 2 bytes for each character. This allows you to form 216 = 65536 combinations where usually only 10,000 - 15,000 characters are used. Double-byte code pages are, for example, SJIS for Japanese and BIG5 for traditional Chinese.

Using these character sets, you can account for each language relevant to the SAP System. However, problems occur if you want to merge texts from different incompatible character sets in a central system. Equally, exchanging data between systems with incompatible character sets can result in unprecedented situations.

One solution to this problem is to use a code comprising all characters used on earth. This code is called Unicode (ISO/IEC 10646) and consists of at least 16 bit = 2 bytes, alternatively of 32 bit = 4 bytes per character.