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Converting Between Character Sets

When you begin to design applications for use in multiple languages, you need to consider both the character sets used by application end users, and those used by application developers. While conversion at the character set level at runtime is automatic, this conversion impacts performance.

For example, if you build an application in one character set and run it in another character set, you may notice a degradation in performance. In addition, if a character set does not contain an equivalent for a particular character, it will display a replacement character instead, for example a question mark (?). However, even if you don’t see any visible difference, as a developer you will want to pay attention to the character sets you use to generate, because of performance issues.

Note Oracle Forms only converts between character sets for the same language, for example AR8MSWIN and AR8ISO, or IW8MSWIN and IW8ISO.

If you are designing applications to run in more than one language, or even in the same language with different character sets, for best performance you will want to match your generate environment to your runtime environment:

Note For Oracle Forms, the character set used when generating is used at runtime, regardless of the character set specified in the runtime environment.