HP-UX 11.0 - 11i Internationalization Features White Paper

Encoding Characters

Unicode 2.1 Support [11.0 patch, 11i v1]

Chapter 2

Unicode 2.1 Support [11.0 patch, 11i v1]

HP-UX provides system-level support for the Unicode 2.1/ISO 10646 character set. Hewlett-Packard’s support

for Unicode provides the basis for enabling heterogeneous interoperability for all locales.

ISO 10646 is an industry standard for defining a single encoding that uniquely encodes all the world’s

characters. Unicode 2.1 is the companion specification to ISO 10646. Unicode support conforms with existing

X/Open (OpenGroup), POSIX, ISO C and other relevant UNIX-based standards.

HP-UX 11.0 supports Unicode/ISO 10646 by using the UTF-8 (Universal Transformation Format - 8)

representation for persistent storage. UTF-8 is an industry-recognized 8-bit multibyte format representation

for Unicode. This representation allows for successful data transmission over 8-bit networking protocols as

well as safe storage and retrieval within a historically byte-oriented operating system such as HP-UX.

For internal processing, HP-UX uses the four-octet (32-bit) canonical form specified in ISO 10646. This

support allows parity with current HP-UX wchar_t implementation, that has been based on a 32-bit

representation.

Full systems level support is available for all locales provided in the release.

For more information on the Unicode features of the Asian System Environment, refer to the

/usr/share/doc/ASX-UTF8 directory.

The following tables display a select subset of locale binaries that are provided for 32-bit application

processing:

Table 2-13 Base utf8 Locales for 32-bit Application Processing

Locale

C.utf8 C UTF-8

univ.utf8 universal

Table 2-14 European utf8 Locales for 32-bit Application Processing

Locale Language (Region)

fr_CA.utf8 French (Canada)

fr_FR.utf8 French (France)

de_DE.utf8 German (Germany)

it_IT.utf8 Italian (Italy)

es_ES.utf8 Spanish (Spain)

sv_SE.utf8 Swedish (Sweden)