CSI Approach

Code set independence enables application and platform software developers to keep their code independent of any encoding, such as UTF-8. CSI also provides the ability to adopt any new encoding without having to modify the source code. This architecture approach differs from Java internationalization because applications do not have to be to be UTF-16–dependent.

Many existing internationalized applications (for example, Motif) automatically inherit CSI support from the underlying system. These applications work in the new locales without modification.

CSI is inherently independent from any code sets. However, the following assumptions about file code encodings (code sets) still apply to the current Oracle Solaris system:

• File code is a superset of ASCII.

• NULL byte value (0x00) does not appear as part of multibyte character bytes for support of null-terminated multibyte character strings.

• ASCII Slash character byte value (0x2f) does not appear as part of multibyte character bytes for support of the UNIX path names.