Unicode Support

[sam]

I wish for support for Unicode strings.

Here is a few line form http://www.unicode.org/

Unicode provides a unique number for every character,

no matter what the platform,

no matter what the program,

no matter what the language

-Sam

[tkr]

i absolutely support your wish.

writing "global applications" for everyone in the world is very inconvenient without the ability of using some kind of "special characters"

greetz Tom

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

i absolutely support your wish.

writing "global applications" for everyone in the world is very inconvenient without the ability of using some kind of "special characters"

greetz Tom

Unicode doesn't solve every problem there is. First there is not one single unicode standard. While Microsoft standardized on 16 bit Unicode (which incidentially does not have enough code space to represent every possible character on earth with a single unique code) Unix usually does standardize on 32 bit Unicode. Also the Unicode collation tables used by Microsoft do have some significant differences from the ones proposed by the Unicode organization.

So implementing Unicode support in LabVIEW will NOT bring a single unified Unicode system across all the supported platforms but instead make it just about as difficult to write text in LabVIEW in a way which does show the same characters on all supported platforms as it is now.

LabVIEW itself uses multibyte characters to support non western code pages (with the help of the underlying OS) and that while not perfect serves almost as good as a Unicode solution could do.

And the biggest problem with global applications is not the character set but the different orientation some of the languages have in written text. For this there is no really good working solution yet, which would allow to write applications that can adapt to the different orientations by a flick of a switch and I doubt there is really a possible solution for this that can figure out this automatically.

Rolf Kalbermatter