Re: Questions about Arabic -- RPG400-L

Some additional comments:
- Client Access and ODBC will handle CCSID conversions from database field
CCSID to PC CCSID,
However, in your case, you will have to have two different CCSIDs on PC -
one for Arabic data and another for English data. You will have to think of
something to handle this.
- you may try to use Unicode (UCS-2) - data type graphic CCSID 13488. In
this way you can have Arabic and English data intermixed in the same field.
Then for display puproses you can extract portions of the field and convert
to proper code for display.

Alexei Pytel

"Simon Coulter"

<shc@flybynight.c To: RPG400-L@midrange.com

om.au> cc:

Sent by: Subject: Questions about Arabic

owner-rpg400-l@mi

drange.com

04/28/2001 09:23

Please respond to

RPG400-L

Hello Raja,

I was hoping that someone who knew more about this than I do would answer
but
since that hasn't happened ...

You wrote:
>I am working on a project which deals with the PF on AS400 having both
>arabic as well as english data.

>I need some information on

If you intend to do much with different character sets you will need to
invest in a copy of the Character Data Representation Architecture
Reference
and Registry (SC09-2190) which is a hardcopy book and two CD-ROMs
containing
the CDRA Library.

>how to set my keyboard to key in arabic data.

Using OS/2 Warp 4 I can simply open the Keyboard object and select Arabic
as
my keyboard type from a list of 55 different keyboard maps. I presume that
a
supposedly modern OS like Windows can do the same. However, when I checked
a
W95 installation (Start->Settings->ControlPanel) and opened the Keyboard
icon
and selected the language tab it only listed two variants of English.
There
is a button to add additional keyboard mapppings but Arabic isn't listed.
Either W95 doesn't support Arabic or you need a special version of W95 that

does support it. I presume the same is true of the other dialects of
windoze
(98 CE ME NT 2K).

OS/400 supports different keyboard types on the device description. There
is
a KBDTYPE parameter on the CRTDEVDSP command which you should set to CLB
for
Arabic. I think you will need to have an Arabic keyboard attached to the
device so the key mappings are correct.

I believe Arabic is an SBCS character set so you can run that on a 'normal'

system using standard devices or emulation products. You probably should
install the Arabic Secondary Language (2954). If Arabic is DBCS, which I
doubt, then you will need to install a DBCS version of OS/400.

Your PC may also need special fonts installed in order to display the
Arabic
characters correctly. However, if you find a version of windoze that
supports the Arabic keyboard then I'd expect it to display Arabic
characters
correctly.

>how to create a physical file which should contain some fields in arabic
>and some fields in english.

Creating a PF to hold both kinds of data is trivial. Simply tag the Arabic

fields with an Arabic CCSID (e.g., 420) and the English fields with an
English CCSID (e.g., 37). Use the DDS keyword CCSID.

>how to transfer arabic data from pc to as400 and viceversa.

The AS/400 FTP client and server use CCSID support to convert between SBCS
character sets. You can control the server ASCII CCSID using CHGFTPA and
the
client (i.e., the AS/400 client) by specifying the required CCSID on the
FTP
command. Since FTP has no concept of fields I don't know if it will
correctly handle a record in which some fields are in one CCSID and some
fields are in another CCSID.

You can use SQL over DRDA to transfer the data and it will correctly handle

the different CCSIDs.

You can probably use the file transfer mechanisms provided in Client Access

also. I'd expect them to correctly handle the CCSIDs but I haven't
suffered
windoze in such a long time I know longer know much about Client Access.

Regardless, some experimentation is in order because the CDRA manual lists
the following Arabic CCSIDs:

00420 Arabic (all presentation shapes)
00864 PC Data: Arabic
01008 Arabic 8-bit ISO/ASCII
01046 Arabic - Windows
01089 ISO 8859-6: Arabic
01256 MS Windows, Arabic
04516 Arabic (base shapes and Lamaleph ligatures)
04960 PC Data: Arabic (all shapes)
05142 Arabic - Windows (base shapes only)
08612 Arabic (base shapes only)
09056 PC Data: Arabic PC Storage/Interchange
13152 PC Data: Arabic Bilingual (base shapes)
25440 PC Display: Arabic - Output Imaging
29536 PC Display: Arabic
33632 PC Display: Arabic (all shapes)
37728 PC Display: Arabic Bilingual (data store subset)
41824 PC Display: Arabic Bilingual (base shapes only)

As you can see, you have some research ahead of you. Have fun!

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

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