[Info-vax] character set translation for language accents

[Neil Rieck]

On Apr 16, 4:15 pm, koeh... at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob
Koehler) wrote:
> In article <2c7f1359-7d41-419a-9d5a-4e0041c14... at k38g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>, jcwoman1... at hotmail.com writes:
>
> > I'm writing an interface between some software that runs on Windows
> > and my software that runs on VMS, and having a problem with character
> > set translation.  The Windows software is using a character set that
> > enables accented characters.  I'm not sure exactly which one (utf-?)
> > but the user interface for the software is in French.  When it sends
> > text data through my interface, it's sending the accented characters.
>
> > When the data comes into my program on VMS, the accented characters
> > have been lost/removed.  My software is running on VMS 8.3 on
> > Integrity.  Is there some way to make it accept/handle the accented
> > characters properly?
>
>    You're going to have to tell us more about how the connection between
>    Windows and VMS is made, as well as the character sets in use on both
>    ends.  Standard sockets will not alter bytes, but naked sockets are
>    not typically used for data that includes font information.
>
>    What character set are you using on Windows (this may be chosen by
>    the software you are running)?  If you are using an MS character set
>    you should not expect anything else to recognise it.  If you are using
>    ISO-Latin-1, VMS will recognise that on the assumption it is DEC MCS.  
>    What are you using on VMS to display the text? X11 windows on VMS
>    will recognise a great many standard fonts, but perhaps not the ones
>    you are using.
>
>    And beware of things like MS "smart quotes".  These are done in
>    violation of character set standards and will not show up correctly
>    on most systems.

The majority of VMS green screen apps are written for 7-bit
characters. When sending output to browsers there are two popular
alternatives: ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 and these must be declared in a
meta statement like so:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1">

In a nut shell, iso-8859-1 characters require one character while
utf-8 can require one or two bytes depending upon what you are trying
to do.

Check out these docs for more details:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_charactersets.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utf-8

Neil Rieck
Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/