Special Characters - Works in desktop application, but in Web, does not....

[rcgomez11]

Good day progressTalkers, i just want to ask about special characters, because I just notice that in I can't viewed the correct characters in web but it does on desktop applications, I want to know why and how can I correct it so it can show it also in web, hope I made myself clear and understandable, thanks in advance and God Bless...

 

[RealHeavyDude]

Welcome to the world of code pages and character sets !

First you need to make yourself familiar with code pages and character sets. There are different character sets ( which define the characters that are supported ) and code pages ( which define how the characters are represented in binary form ). The most common character set is the ASCII and one of the most used code pages for desktop applications is iso8859-1 where it is UTF-8 for web applications.

Now comes the tricky part: If you have two clients visualizing the same data they must both share the same character set and code pages which support this character set. If they don't you will see exactly what you are seeing. Some technologies like Progress OpenEdge do an automatic mapping between code pages when it is possible ( both code pages supporting the same character set - meaning each character is present in both code pages but with a different binary representation, commonly called the ASCII code ). If it is not possible you need to roll your own mapping.

The least common denominator - or the furthest developed standard if you want to - is Unicode ( UTF-8 or UTF-16). These code pages are designed to cope with all possible characters included in most code pages used around the world. I deliberately said the furthest developed - because nothing is perfect.

Bottom line: You need to make sure that both applications use mappable code pages and if one of these applications is a web applications it will be most likely UTF-8. But, in order to fix your problem you need to what you are dealing with first ...

Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.

 

[rcgomez11]

Thanks for welcoming, I really dont know this stuff, thanks for the reply..anyway, to make my query short, how can i see which code pages used by my desktop app and my web app? and lastly, how to map code pages to cater my desktop app and web app correctly?Thanks for the reply, i really appreciated it...God Bless...

 

[RealHeavyDude]

You don't tell anything about the software which your desktop application uses - so, as this is a Progress related forum, I am assuming it's Progress GUI. The code pages used by the Progress client are defined by start parameters which begin with -cp*. You need to check your parameter files which ones of them you have set. If you do not set anything than the ones from the startup.pf in the installation directory fire ( the startup.pf gets created during installation from your choices ). The most important ones are the -cpstream ( used for output - visualization ) and the -cpinternal ( used internally ).

Does your desktop application use an AppServer or goes directly to the database? You need to check the code page of the database too. I think your problem originates from the code page of the database not being set correctly and therefore the mapping in your web application does not work.

The following KBase article provides information on how to determine the code page used by the database.

http://progresscustomersupport-surv...7787?retURL=/apex/KnowledgeSearch&popup=false

Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.