[Info-vax] Character sets

[Craig A. Berry]

On 9/3/22 2:30 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> Little (nothing?) past the ODS-5 UTF-8 filename work exists with 
> OpenVMS, and—as with most of the retrofit-compatible-hackery—that's less 
> than easy for apps to use. You'll probably be using or porting recent 
> versions of ICU, libunistring, or ilk, and the OpenVMS 32- and 64-bit 
> string descriptors are unfortunately also less than useful here around 
> language and encoding. (This is where the object abstraction shines, 
> too. It's what descriptors and itemlists evolved into, on other platforms.)

At the app level, yes, you have to have a library that works with
whatever language your app is written in.  At the utility level, Perl is
available and has piconv, which does a bit more than the iconv that
ships with the SYS$I18N stuff.  Or you can write your apps in Perl.  I
forget how Python handles Unicode, but people who do Python tell me its
Unicode handling is significantly less lame with Python 3 than it was
with Python 2.