Information on UNICODE support

UNICODE support

The Unicode Standard is a standardized character code designed and used to better represent international texts for better display and storage. It uses a unique 16- or 32–bit value to represent each individual character, regardless of platform, language, or program. Using Unicode, anyone could develop a software product that will work with various platforms, languages, and most importantly will support different countries or regions. Unicode also allows data to be visible, displayed, stored and transported through many different systems.

There are two different forms of Unicode support available. This section describes the two forms of Unicode support as well as some of the features of and considerations for using that support. To obtain additional information about Unicode, visit the Unicode Home Page at www.unicode.org.

The first type of Unicode support is UCS-2 support. Most compilers use wide characters (that is, characters of the wchar_t type) and wide character strings (that is, strings of the wchar_t * type) that represent 2-byte Unicode symbols (characters). Narrow (non-wide) characters and narrow character strings represent EBCDIC characters, just as they do when the UCS-2 support is not enabled. The Unicode characters represent code points in CCSID 13488.

The second type of Unicode support is UTF-8 or UTF-32 support (also known as UTF support). When UNICODE UTF-32 options is specified, most compilers use wide characters and wide character strings that represent 4-byte Unicode characters. Each 4-byte symbol (character) represents a single UTF-32 character. Narrow characters and narrow character strings represent UTF-8 characters.

In a nutshell: Each UTF character is from 1 to 4 bytes in size. Most normal characters are a single byte in size, and, in fact, all 7-bit ASCII characters map directly to UTF-8 and are 1 byte in size. The UTF-8 characters represent code points in CCSID 1208.

All SecureUPDATE programs, applications and software is specifically designed to use, support, display and work with UNICODE symbols (characters) and strings.

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