The application locale / Locale and character set basics |
If you don't know what you are doing with character sets, the end user might get strange characters displayed on the screen, and will probably not be able to input non-ASCII characters. In the worst case, as character set conversion can be symmetric for single-byte character sets, the end user might see correct characters on the workstation, but on the back-end you can get invalid characters in the database files. By upgrading to a newer OS, Genero Business Development Language runtime or database system, or if a character set mapping utility was used somewhere in the chain, you can even get mixed character encoding in the database files.