Codeset Independence Support

Before the release of the Solaris 7 operating system, the Sun OS and the Solaris internationalization framework supported only Extended UNIX Code (EUC) representation. This prevented support of new encodings that didn't fit the EUC model, such as PC-Kanji in Japan, Big-5 in Taiwan and GBK in the People's Republic of China.

Because a large part of the computer market demands non-EUC codeset support, Solaris 7 provides a solid framework to enable both EUC and non-EUC codeset support. This support is called Codeset Independence, or CSI.

The goal of CSI is to remove EUC dependencies on specific codesets or encoding methods from Solaris OS libraries and commands. The CSI architecture allows the Solaris operating environment to support any UNIX file system safe encoding. CSI supports a number of new codesets, such as UTF-8, PC-Kanji [Japanese Solaris 2.5.1 supports PC Kanji (also known as Shift-JIS).] , and Big-5.