Language drivers > Language driver special issues

Receiving tables

Receiving tables not compliant with entering some characters

If you receive tables with older (DOS-age) language drivers which, for example not allowing the Euro character (€), do not just change the driver to the Euro-compatible driver DBWINWE0 as this will also alter mapping of a number of other contained extended ASCII characters.
To port the table to the DBWINWE0 driver you may however do the following:

•Check that the BDE Administrator uses ['WEurope' ANSI] as the default language driver (for new tables) which in BDE lingo is the DBWINWE0 driver.

•Create an SQL as SELECT * FROM {name of the source table};
and run the query.

•From the PdxEditor Export Menu choose the Export Current Query Result as Current Table Format ... and choose some table name comparable to the original table. This newly created table will have the current default driver applied and all extended characters will have remapped to this driver as necessary.

•Delete the original table.

•Rename the new table with the name of the original table.
This transformed table will accept any character input compatible with this new driver including e.g. the € character.

Retrieving tables with non-compliant language drivers

So, how will I (residing in the Western World) read and preserve, for example, Cyrillic data received in dBASE or Paradox tables?
Before opening the data you should (temporarily) reconfigure the language setting of your Windows computer to comply with character set of the received data:

•Open the Control Panel, select Region and Language and open the Administrative tab. Select the desired language with the [Change system locale ...] button and restart your system.

•In PdxEditor you can see the current Windows and OEM character maps in the About dialog.

•If necessary, you can separately alter the OEM character set by using the Windows system editor Regedit.exe and modifying the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\CodePage and then alter the data of the value OEMCP to some Code Page value (e.g. 866, 855, 808 or 872) compatible with the current Windows code page (e.g. ACP = 1251, Cyrillic), and restart your system.

•Open the received data in some dBASE/Paradox application, e.g. with PdxEditor.
To be able to preserve the Cyrillics, it is recommended using the PdxEditor as it has the capacity to export with UTF-8 text encoding.

•Export the data as text data which will now be UTF-8 coded, preserving the characters even when switching back to your usual language and character set settings.

•Reset your Windows system to your usual preferences.

•Although a Unicode based output is not compatible with any BDE database system, the exported data will now be ready for import into any modern internally Unicode compliant database system.

•If exported with the Byte Order Mark (BOM), data will also open correctly in MS Excel.

Samples

For various samples, please see the comprehensive BDE language drivers article.