Strings and Character Encodings
Rendezvous software uses strings in several roles:
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String data inside message fields |
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Subject names (and other associated strings that are not strictly inside the message) |
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Certified delivery correspondent names |
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Group names (fault tolerance) |
All these strings (both in C++ and in wire format) use the character encoding appropriate to the ISO locale of the sender. For example, the United States is locale en_US, and uses the Latin-1 character encoding (also called ISO 8859-1); Japan is locale ja_JP, and uses the Shift-JIS character encoding.
When two programs exchange messages within the same locale, strings are always correct. However, when a message sender and receiver use different character encodings, the receiving program must convert between encodings as needed. Rendezvous software does not convert automatically.