Re: How to display German "extra" characters

Michael,
Welcome to the brain-bending world of NLS! Firstly, you should keep the
system code page as US (037) if you are in the US. The AS/400 translates the
characters according to the code page tables in QUSRSYS (for example
Q857A7AA3S is Windows 857 to Turkish 1026). Sometimes you have to modify
these tables to get the results you expect! (To do this you have to use
crttbl and copy an existing one.)
If you have no PCs involved, things normally work OKish - but most people
have PCs with client access rather than twinax terminals these days. You
need to know that not all the bits of software involved work the same way.
For example what you see on a client access screen using DFU may not be what
you see using PDM which may not be what you see using DSPPFM! Fun, isn't it?
And many PC softwares don't know about code pages at all - for example FTP
and ODBC.
So you need to start with what you want to achieve - who needs to see what?
If you have users in Germany passing through to your system, they may see
the umlauts when you do not for example. Obviously you need to test the
solution to make sure it works for them. not for you. And if you have third
party developers, what code page are they developing and compiling under?
There are different levels where you can specify code page - system, display
and file for example.
To be absolutely sure about what is going on, you need to look at the Hex
representation of each character. In the NLS manuals (probably on the net
these days) you should be able to find graphic representations of each code
page. You will see that for example Hex C0 in the UK (285) code page is a
left curly bracket. However, Hex C0 on the France (297) code page is
lower-case e with an acute accent. So if a character is displayed as left
curly bracket on a system in the UK, It should display as e acute in France,
given that all the other variables are in agreement! (Don't forget printers
too...)
The German code page is 273, and upper case U Umlaut is Hex 5A, which in the
US code page (037) is exclamation mark.
But of course, it's not that simple, because you may be doing a 2-way double
pass translation (code page to code page and EBCDIC to ASCII both from and
to the AS/400), and that can really garble the results, just like the German
Enigma machine did with codes in the war!
It's quite tricky to work out then what the original needs to be to achieve
the desired result. And keep in mind that different versions of Dos/Windows
use different ASCII translation tables, and there are also some new ones in
Europe since 'Eastern Europe' was welcomed back into the fold.
The real problem is that neither EBCDIC nor ASCII (which has fewer
characters available than EBCDIC even) are big enough to support all the
possible characters. The only solution is Unicode, when each character will
be a double byte instead of a single byte, and we will be able to have all
the different ones on one code page.
Good luck,
Clare

Clare Holtham
Director, Small Blue Ltd - Archiving for BPCS
IBM Certified AS/400 Systems Professional
E-Mail: Clare.Holtham@btinternet.com
Mobile: +44 (0)7960 665958
----- Original Message -----
From: <Mlpolutta@aol.com>
To: <midrange-l@midrange.com>
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2002 6:38 PM
Subject: How to display German "extra" characters


Folks,

What code page do I use to display umlauts and other fun German things?

We are changing our system to use MSGF entries for all "literals" in our
display files so we can "easily" have multiple-language support.  We have
our first round of data back from the translators.  However, some characters
did not map according to expecatations - the umlaut became the 3/4 symbol,
for instance.

Thanks for your help!
Michael Polutta
Atlanta, GA
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