README.unicode

#
# Author Martin J. Evans (mjevans at cpan dot org)
#

This document is historical now. If all you want to know is what Unicode
is supported by DBD::ODBC read the DBD::ODBC pod.

The original Unicode support was written by Alexander Foken and posted
as a patch. You can find Alexander's original README document in
README.af (some of this is directly taken from that document).  Around
DBD::ODBC 1.14 Alexander's original patch was adapted to include
optional Unicode support for UNIX and introduced into DBD::ODBC.

In DBD::ODBC 1.17 the Unicode support in DBD::ODBC on both Windows and
Unix was enhanced considerably to support unicode SQL strings, column
names and connection strings (although see caveat below).

Most of the unicode documentation that was here has now moved to the main
DBD::ODBC pod.

Attributions
============

A substantial part of the code to translate between UTF8 and UTF16
came from the unicode web site (Unicode Inc) and was authored by Mark
E. Davis and updated by various (see ConvertUTF.c). This code was
modified in minor ways to allow ConvertUTF16toUTF8 and
ConvertUTF8toUTF16 to accept NULL target pointers and return the
number of bytes required in the target string for the conversion.

A substantial part (most in fact) of the original Unicode support in
DBD::ODBC for wide bound columns and parameters was written by
Alexander Foken and simply changed to support UNIX as well as Windows
by me.

Patches/Problems
================

Please see the main README. The best place to discuss DBD::ODBC is on
the dbi-users mailing list.