[Info-vax] character set translation for language accents

[norm.raphael at metso.com]

info-vax-bounces at rbnsn.com wrote on 04/17/2009 11:29:51 AM:

> jcwoman1963 at hotmail.com wrote:
> > Here is more info.  I'm using a tcpip socket for my communications
> > path.  Luckily, on the VMS side my device driver and application are
> > written in Macro, so I'm able to debug and troubleshoot them to my
> > heart's content.  I have a "trace" function written into the driver
> > that simply copies the data it receives from the socket to my screen,
> > along with a hex representation of the same data.  So I found that
> > while the data is being displayed as (null, I assume), the hex appears
> > to be correct.
> > 
> > For example, when I receive this data:
> > 
> > Vous répondez à une personne....
> > 
> > my system displays it as this:
> > 
> > Vous rpondez  une personne....
> > 
> > but the hex translation is this:
> > 
> > 56 6f 75 73 20 72 e9 70 6f 6e 64 65 7a 20 e0 20 75 6e 65 20 70
> > 65 .....
> > 
> > Since it sees that first  é    as hex e9, does that mean it's not
> > truncating the high order bit, or still is?  If I'm not being
> > truncated, I can easily add my own translation table to make the hex
> > e9 = a plain old e.  It's not ideal for language, but I think this
> > customer is used to our system not having accents, so it would
> > probably be more acceptable than just dropping letters out of words.
> 
> I suspect that your hardware and/or software was designed by a mono 
> lingual American! ;-)  If you are receiving hex e9 but not rendering it 
> as é your hardware/software simply does not know how to display it 
> properly.  If the manufacturers can shave fifty cents off the price by 
> not supporting accented characters that most Americans can't use or 
> pronounce properly, they will!  My PC keyboard won't let me type é in 
> any obvious way; I cut and pasted it!  My DEC LK-461 keyboard has a 
> "Compose" key that will let me type é.

I have an OpenVMS application that uses ANSI standard 7-bit characters.
Unfortunately, an app that feeds text strings to it is blissfully happy 
to generate French, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, German, accented and 
"composed" characters, depending on country-of-origin.  These get 
into the text field usually as 2-byte thingys, causing a field 
overrun and or wierd control bytes at the far end app.

The only cure s/b a replacement to standard ascii, so e-accented 
would be rendered as e, c-cedilla as c, etc.
I cannot change the far end app code, so the feed needs to be changed 
before I get it.

Now is that possible with a character-codeset change/

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