2.11 Using an MBSTRING Typed Buffer
To support the multibyte coded character sets required by Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other Asian Pacific languages, Oracle Tuxedo includes the MBSTRING typed buffer for transport of multibyte character user data. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other Asian Pacific languages use coded character sets that use more than one byte to represent a character.
Using the MBSTRING typed buffer and the multibyte character
encoding feature, the Oracle Tuxedo system can convert user data
from one encoding representation to another encoding representation
when an MBSTRING buffer (or an FLD_MBSTRING field in
an FML32 buffer) is transmitted between processes. The
following figure shows through example how encoding conversion
works.
Figure 2-1 Encoding Conversion Using MBSTRING Buffers—Example
As indicated in the example, the MBSTRING typed buffer is
capable of carrying information identifying the code-set
character encoding, or simply encoding, of its user
data. In the example, the client-request MBSTRING buffer holds
Japanese user data represented by the Shift-JIS (SJIS) encoding,
while the server-reply MBSTRING buffer holds Japanese user data
represented by the Extended UNIX Code (EUC) encoding. The multibyte
character encoding feature reads environment variables
TPMBENC and TPMBACONV to determine the
source encoding, the target encoding, and the state (on or off) of
automatic encoding conversion.
The encoding conversion capability enables the underlying Tuxedo system software to convert the encoding representation of an incoming message to an encoding representation supported by the machine on which the receiving process is running. The conversion is neither a conversion between character code sets nor a translation between languages, but rather a conversion between different character encodings for the same language.