Codepage issues with the slash character

["David Gibbs" <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Folks:

I've got an odd problem with code pages ... in one of our programs, the
users enters an IFS path... which we then validate (using some API calls).

Most paths begin with a back slash "\" character (for backwards
compatibility, I think) ... and our program (RPG IV) checks the first
character to make sure it's a backslash.

This works fine on our machine (US based, code page 37) ... but on one of
our customers machines in Italy (code page 280) our program is looking at
the first character of that field and seeing something OTHER than a
backslash (kind of a cents sign with a tail, don't know what it's called).

To be honest, I really don't expect a character as basic as a slash or
backslash to have a different hex value in two major language sets.

How are you supposed to deal with these kind of differences?

Thanks!

david