Converting legacy data to Unicode/UTF-8 in Lianja v2.0

A "Code page" in Microsoft Windows is used to represent text in non-english languages.

For modern applications UTF-8 is the preferred encoding as this is better understood by web browsers.

UTF-8 is a muti byte character encoding of Unicode that can represent any language and is device and operating system independent.

Most VFP developers have used localized code pages e.g. german, french, etc so the data that they have in their databases is code page specific.

We recommend that you use UTF-8.

A number of developers have requested a way of converting their databases from code page data to UTF-8 so I have added this functionality into v2.0.

I would recommend that you make a copy of your database first and convert that copy. If all looks fine then you can perform the conversion on your real database.

The following steps describe the process for data conversion.

Step 1

Open the App Builder

Step 2

Copy the database

Step 3

Code:

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convertutf8 database barry

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The screen shot below shows you that initially any code page data cannot be displayed as I have en_US has my data locale. The chr(220) is a german Ü character in the german code page.

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After conversion completes you should now add the --utf8 command line switch to the Lianja desktop shortcut.

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Run the App Builder now with the --utf8 command line switch and you can now see that the data is now displayed as Unicode as the data is now stored in UTF-8 format.

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