Supporting Non-ASCII Characters

An IBM Informix product obtains its code set from its GLS locale. Locales are available for both single-byte and multibyte code sets. All supported code sets define the ASCII characters. Most also support additional non-ASCII characters (8-bit or multibyte characters). For more information on code sets and non-ASCII characters, see Code Sets for Character Data.

The following types of GLS locales are examples of locales that contain non-ASCII characters in their code sets:

• The default locale supports the default code set, which contains 8-bit characters for non-English characters such as é, ñ, and ö.

  The name of the default code set depends on the platform on which your IBM Informix product is installed. For more information on the default code set, The Default Code Set.

• Many nondefault locales support the default code set.
  UNIX Only

  Nondefault locales that support the UNIX default code set, ISO8859-1, include British English (en_gb.8859-1), French (fr_fr.8859-1), Spanish (es_es.8859-1), and German (de_de.8859-1).

  End of UNIX Only
• Other nondefault locales, such as Japanese SJIS (ja_jp.sjis), Korean (ko_kr.ksc), and Chinese (zh_cn.gb), contain multibyte code sets. (The unified Chinese code set is GB18030-2000.)

For the contexts in which you can use non-ASCII characters, including multibyte characters, see SQL Features, Database Server Features, and General SQL API Features (ESQL/C).

For an IBM Informix product to support non-ASCII characters, however, it must use a locale that supports a code set with the same non-ASCII characters.