RE: Implementation of Unicode

From: Carl W. Brown (cbrown@xnetinc.com)
Date: Wed Sep 27 2000 - 16:19:27 EDT


Dear Sir,

Since Unicode is a superset of codepage 850 you certainly can filter out any
other characters. I suggest that you filter these out as close to the
keying as possible. Since you are using codepage 850 data, you might want
to look at using UTF-8 for storing your data since most characters will be
the same as one byte ASCII characters. Only a few special characters will
be two byte characters (The characters in CP 850 that are > 0x7F). Use the
fixed width form (UCS2 or UTF-16) of Unicode for internal processing such as
string scanning and the like.

Carl

-----Original Message-----
From: Magda Danish (Unicode) [mailto:v-magdad@microsoft.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2000 8:47 AM
To: Unicode List
Subject: FW: Implementation of Unicode

-----Original Message-----
From: McGonigle, Laurence [mailto:laurence.mcgonigle@justice.wa.gov.au]
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2000 8:51 PM
To: 'info@unicode.org'
Subject: Implementation of Unicode

Hi, we are a large government organisation in Western Australia and require
some advice on the use and implementation of Unicode. The business area in
question is the Registry of Births, Deaths & Marriages which is a government
agency within the Ministry of Justice. This agency needs to register all
births, deaths and marriages in the state of Western Australia and has a
policy on what characters it will accept and register for a name. In
summary the policy has forced the use of an old DOS based Code Page Set
(i.e. Latin 850). The agency would like to continue to restrict input of
names to characters that appear on this Code Page Set. With the migration
to a new system planned for February 2001 (system will also be available on
the Internet) it is envisaged that we will need to implement Unicode if we
are to continue to use the characters of the Latin 850 Code Page Set.

Given the above, my question is as follows:
* Is it possible to implement the Unicode standard but easily restrict
the input of characters to those currently available in the Latin 850 Code
Page Set?

* Further, if we decide in the future to allow other characters to be
input, is there an easy method available to permit the use of the additional
characters?

I look forward to your response.

> Thank-you
>
>
> Laurence McGonigle
> Project Manager
> Ministry of Justice (Information Services Directorate)
> Ph: 9264 1614
> E-mail: Laurence.McGonigle@justice.wa.gov.au
>



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