[omniORB] OmniOrb and CP1252 (Windows Latin 1) vs. ISO-8859-1

[Steven Sauder]

Hi all!

We’re a long-time user of OmniOrb with great success in our applications,
but something has recently come up which is causing problems for our
European customers.  Our applications all speak the (full) Windows CP1252
(Windows Latin 1) character set, in which Microsoft has used the code point
0x80 to represent the Euro symbol (€).  CP1252 and ISO-8859-1 are “almost”
the same, except that CP1252 utilizes the 0x80 code point to represent the
Euro, where ISO-8859-1 leaves this code point blank.

After a bit of investigation, it seems that OmniOrb by default uses
ISO-8859-1 as the “native” codeset, which I had thought would mean that the
Euro symbol (and a couple of other “special” characters such as the
trademark symbol, and the “curly” printers quotes), which are represented in
CP1252, but not in ISO-8859-1, could not be handled by OmniOrb using its
default codeset.  However, digging into cs-8859-1.cc a little more, it looks
like the translation tables ARE passing 0x80 through to UCS as 0x0080, so
unless I’m reading this wrong, any OmniOrb-to-OmniOrb communications (on
Windows) should pass the (Windows-specific) Euro code point 0x80 through
without problem.  Am I reading this right?

However, the difficulty arises because we have several CORBA components
which are written using the standard Java ORB, which (it appears) is not
providing the same amount of leeway with this symbol, and insists on
transmitting the Euro symbol in it’s “true” UCS16 representation (0x20AC),
which OmniOrb’s codeset converters end up turning into a “?” when we receive
it on the Windows end.

Has anyone had any experience with this?  From what I’ve read so far, it
seems the only viable solution would be to write our own NCS-C
implementation that handled the CP1252 Euro symbol (0x80) to Unicode
(0x20AC) and back-again conversion through the translation tables as is
currently happening in cs-8859-1.cc, is this correct?

Any help would be hugely appreciated!
Thanks
Steve.
-- 
Steve Sauder
Chief Technology Officer
North Plains Systems Corp.
510 Front Street West, 4th Floor
Toronto, ON
Canada  M5V 3H3
P:   (416) 345-1900 ext. 500
F:   (416) 599-0808
W:  http://www.northplains.com/
E:   ssauder at northplains.com

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