Migrating Applications from ASCII to Unicode (Score 2, Informative)

It sounds like part of your system is using code pages to communicate is various languages like a web baised application. The data portions is not the linguistic text but just items that can be represented in ASCII. Some of you application can only support ASCII and all the data in your database is ASCII. If it is truly ASCII 0 - 127 (0x7F) (7 bit clean)then you data can often just redefine the database to declace that it contains UTF-8 (Unicode) data. But you must be sure that is is 7-bit clean first. Ont of the best Unicode support packages for C/C++ code (I assume that this is C) is ICU. http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/ ICU uses UTF-16, but there is xIUA http://www.xnetinc.com/xiua/ which is also free open source software that add UTF-8 support to ICU. Even better it will allow you to add support and still run in code page first and then you the same code to support Unicode. It makes it easy to develop hybred application that may use Unicode in one part of the application and not in another. It will also allow you to use UTF-8 for database access. UTF-32 to interfece with Linux Unicode wchar_t and a mix of code page and UTF-8 requests to a browser.