Jim,
I am working on a project right now with this same requirement. I'm
tackling this issue as we speak (and have been for nearly a week now).
My application requires that users can input data in any language and
then that data is stored in the database and must be displayed
(correctly) on a web page. I've made some progress, but this has proven
to be a greater challenge than I expected. I don't have a full solution
yet, but here's what I've done thus far.
Set the charset to UTF-8 on the web page using the
ServletResponse.setContentType() method. Somehow you have to get the
data into the database in UTF-8 encoded format. I am using SQL Server
2000 as the database, which supports Unicode data internally, however it
uses UCS-2/UTF-16 encoding. I have found that if I use a regular column
type (i.e. not the special Unicode type) in the database, and enter the
data from a web form encoded in UTF-8, it will usually display
correctly. I've encountered some problems with Simplified and
Traditional Chinese, but I have had success with Spanish, Thai, Korean,
and Japanese.
The key when processing the form is to take the text value from the web
form and call getBytes("utf-8") on it to get a byte array encoded in
UTF-8. Then create a new String from the resulting byte array and save
that string to the database. Then when displaying the string from the
database to the web, make sure the page encoding is set to UTF-8 (as
mentioned above).
Calling getBytes("utf-8") on the form value seems odd given that the
page encoding is set to UTF-8. This is the step I wasn't doing until
today because it just didn't seem right. But sure enough, it seems to
work. Maybe it has something to do with Java storing Strings internally
in Unicode.
I hope my rambling proves useful to you. If I learn anything more, I'll
pass it along. I'd appreciate any bits of knowledge you pick up along
the way as well. :)
Thanks,
Eric
-----Original Message-----
From: jim_garrett@xxxxxxxx [mailto:jim_garrett@xxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 15:12
To: users@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [cinjug-users] Localization and I18N
I have a question I was hoping someone has done before and can provide
some guidance. I have a customer who wants to be able to display data
fields and their values in the correct language when using a web
interface. I am very familiar with how to localize the text fields, but
the actual data, that comes from the database, is a completely different
animal. I would assume a different table must exist for each language
to be displayed; and I assume a person would have to translate the text
manually that is stored in the table.
Has anyone encountered this type of requirements before? If so how did
you solve this problem.
thanks in advance
Jim Garrett
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