[thelist] Japanese Cold Fusion system

[Andrew Clover]

> But I have also been told English CF and Solaris and Sybase can do 
> the job -- that it is just a character set issue at the browser.

It depends if you actually need to *do* anything with the text in CF and
Sybase. If all you need is to accept a string of characters and output it
again later, you can just use normal strings and you don't have to care
that they'll actually be double-byte encoded characters, as long as you
know their encoding. (eg. Shift-JIS, or, better, UTF-8 Unicode.)

If, however, you need to manipulate those strings in ways that require
knowledge of where each encoded character begins and ends, you will need
tools with native support for that encoding. For example, if you need your
database to return its values properly SORTed, it will have to know the
ordering of the Japanese character set (or *sets*, rather). If you need
to have CF filter the strings, CF will have to understand the character
set.

I don't know about CF and Sybase in particular, but the license for a
Japanese-capable version seems harsh. Is it possible to use another
server-side-scripting solution? (I use Python, for example, which has
support for Unicode strings built-in.)

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://and.doxdesk.com/