HP-UX 11.0 - 11i Internationalization Features White Paper

Commands and Libraries

Functions and Interfaces [11.0]

Chapter 5

Functions and Interfaces [11.0]

Internationalization- and Localization-related Changes

The multibyte routines (mblen(), mbtowc(), mbstowcs(), wctomb(), and wcstombs()) in past releases have

incorrectly identified certain invalid characters as valid for the ko_KR.eucKR, zh_CN.hp15CN, zh_TW.big5,

and zh_TW.ccdc locales.

The locale definitions and method libraries have been modified so that these locales only recognize 7-bit

ASCII single-byte values and the following two-byte values as valid characters.

The multibyte.3c routines now exhibit the behavior that is documented in the man pages. Because the

input methods for these languages do not support the invalid characters, this should not impact customer

applications. Users are now be able to use the multibyte routines to check for character validity.

Limited impact on performance is expected in most cases. The simplified Chinese locale (zh_CN.hp15CN)

user-defined character range ([0xfb,0x3f-0x7e] and [0xfc-0xfe,0x21-0x7e]) requires additional checks that

cause the routines to be slower for UDCs than the other character ranges.

No applications conforming to the documented behavior are affected. HP has made every attempt to verify

that no applications depend on the prior behavior.

The ability exists to create and use user-defined locales and method libraries instead of the system-provided

locales.

Table 5-1 Two-byte Values Recognized by Asian Locales

Locale First Byte Second Byte

ko_KR.eucKR 0xa1-0xfe 0xa1-0xfe

zh_CN.hp15CN

a. The Simplified Chinese locale is no longer supported by the HP15 method library. A new method

library, libhp15CN.sl, has been created to support the zh_CN.hp15CN locale. To access this library,

the -m option of localedef must be used with a method file that specifies the libhp15CN.sl

library. See /usr/lib/nls/loc/src/zh_CN.hp15CN.m for an example.

0xa1-0xfe

0xfb

0xfc-0xfe

0xa1-0xfe

0x3f-0x7e

0x21-0x7e

zh_TW.ccdc 0xa1-0xfe 0x21-0x7e,0xa1-0xfe

zh_TW.big5 0x81-0xfe 0x40-0x7e,0xa1-0xfe