Problem: Does InterBase provide support for Hebrew and Arabic Languages? Solution: This article applies to all versions of InterBase through 6.0 InterBase does not currently have a Hebrew or Arabic driver. In Hebrew and Arabic (called bi-directional languages for a reason you'll see in a moment) - the "normal" display order is right-to-left, however, the storage order is "left-to-right". Furthermore, embedded "foreign" words and numbers are displayed left-to-right. Assume uppercase characters are Hebrew, and lower are English. The string 'HELLO world REPEATED 123 TIMES' is displayed as 'SEMIT 123 DETAEPER world OLLEH' Indices are built using storage order, not display order. Display is also complicated by the script nature of Arabic - where the glyph that represents a character is determined by the glyphs of the characters to the left-and-right. OS Display primitives generally take care of all this. Another big However: Binary indices (character set order) of Arabic and Hebrew are easy to make. Dictionary indices become quite a bit harder. Even though InterBase does not support Hebrew and Arabic - there is an ability to add character set and collations to the product. Perhaps if you submit requests to Inprise this can be documented in the future. If you don't need to use translitation (multiple character sets in the same product) - you could simply store your character data in CHARACTER SET NONE fields. You won't get Hebrew or Arabic dictionary collation, but you will get back the same byte sequence you put into the database. UNICODE_FSS is an alternate - but your client end may have to convert the UNICODE_FSS to Unicode or Hebrew character set before IO. Source: Dave Brookstone Schnepper 4/29/99 Listserve
Last Modified: 05-NOV-02