RE: Positioning the Cursor, from the Toolbox

From: Joe Sam Shirah

    I'm not aware of a standard, or even AS/400 proprietary, general
alternative to handling storage of multiple character sets that doesn't
involve a different file/table for each encoding.

I'm not sure what your point is here.  If you're storing multiple translated
values of a string, then you need to store multiple values of that string.
The only issue is whether every character takes one or two bytes.  With
standard i5/OS CCSID processing you can handle the European and N/S American
languages quite easily.  You would only need DBCS data for the double byte
languages (at which point, you may well want to use Unicode).

    If my previous message seemed to imply that everyone should do a
wholesale conversion to Unicode via UTF-8, then I made a communication
error, althuogh I tried to be explicit that it related to I18N issues.

If you're multi-lingual but your sites are all Western Hemisphere, then you
will do fine using single-byte data. 

    I'm always happy to be educated if you have a better solution than
Unicode, especially as UTF-8,  and I'm sure others would be interested as
well.

My solution is to use Unicode (or any multi-byte storage) only if you need
it, and that "internationalization" is too vague a term to justify a
wholesale change to Unicode.

No biggie.

Joe