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Unicode: Encodings
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To summarize the previous section: a Unicode string is a sequence of code points, which are numbers from 0 to 0x10ffff. This sequence needs to be represented as a set of bytes (meaning, values from 0-255) in memory. The rules for translating a Unicode string into a sequence of bytes are called an encoding.
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For printing Unicode text or data files, there is uniprint which is distributed with the Yudit package. Another, lesser-known utility is called paps. If you are a developer... take a look at LASi, a C++ stream-based library for printing Postscript.
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[I]n fact now that you're thinking of things in terms of platonic ideal letters which are represented by Unicode code points, those unicode code points can be encoded in any old-school encoding scheme, too! For example, you could encode the Unicode string for Hello (U+0048 U+0065 U+006C U+006C U+006F) in ASCII, or the old OEM Greek Encoding, or the Hebrew ANSI Encoding, or any of several hundred encodings that have been invented so far, with one catch: some of the letters might not show up! If there's no equivalent for the Unicode code point you're trying to represent in the encoding you're trying to represent it in, you usually get a little question mark: ? or, if you're really good, a box. Which did you get?
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Porting existing code page-based applications to Unicode is easier than you might think. In fact, Unicode was implemented in such a way as to make writing Unicode applications almost transparent to developers. Unicode ... needed to be implemented in such a way as to ensure that non-Unicode applications remain functional whenever running in a pure Unicode platform. To accommodate these needs, the implementation of Unicode required changes in two major areas:
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Unicode data is usually converted to a particular encoding before it gets written to disk or sent over a socket. It's possible to do all the work yourself: open a file, read an 8-bit string from it, and convert the string with
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The performance of a Unicode database can exceed the performance of a single-byte database implemented in a previous release. For example, a Unicode database in Oracle Database 10g will typically run faster than a single-byte database running on Oracle9i, all other things being equal. And of course there are other great Oracle features, such as Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Grid Computing, to accelerate performance as needed.
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Encodings