Problem in displaying unicode data in access db in its normal form in access form

[ashish_access]

In my access database I have a filed in a table which contains data in Unicode format(UTF-8).When I display that data in my access form it is displayed same as in database,whereas what I actually required is to display data in its actual(non-unicode form).Please suggest me some solution.

[Dal Jeanis]

Unfortunately, you're asking the question on a predominantly English site populated by people who don't generally have to deal with the technical issues that you're needing help on - extended character sets, code pages and UTF-8 conversions. That means that you'll just have to learn the answer by trial and error. You just have to learn how it works.

Let me break down the problem for you. The computer thinks in 1's and 0's. At each point in the lifecycle of a piece of data or text, the data has an encoding - how that pattern of 1's and 0's fits together. The quick, cheap, American English version is ANSI, and takes 1 byte per character. Everything else is bigger, and takes more space, but can store more information in more different ways.

If you are storing something that is written in Hindi, then it doesn't have a "normal", ANSI form. You can't fit Hindi letters into that a-z, A-Z, 0-9 American English space. (Unless your entire PC were set to display that way, in which case you probably wouldn't be asking us the question.) Therefore, if you want it to display in Hindi script, but your machine runs native in English, then you're not trying to get the machine to display the non-unicode version, you're trying to get the machine to display the unicode/UTF-8 correctly.

So, you have this data that is coming from somewhere, going to somewhere else, and you are trying to convince the computer that it wants to paint nice, pretty, Devanagari-style letters for that data when you show it on the screen.

I've found web pages that say that, in "Message Boxes" and other system messages, that's not going to happen. The message boxes are ANSI only, and display only in the language that has been selected for the computer itself. However, on forms you can show the information in text boxes using a character script based upon your local page settings. You just have to be careful when moving the data around not to accidentally change it from Unicode/UTF-8 to anything else, and you have to put the data someplace that Access will understand that it's supposed to use that local code page.

Now, I really can't set up a situation where I would be able to even attempt to test what you need to do, and I wouldn't be able to tell if the letters that came out of my test made any sense, or whether they came out in Gujarati or Tamil or Swahili, for that matter. If the following references don't tell you enough to let you figure out what you need to know, then you might try posting your question on either the Microsoft site itself, or on Hindi or Urdu language sites where the people might have fought this battle before.

When you get it worked out, please come back and post the steps that resolved the issue. Also, please post the considerations that a personshould use in defining the interface to show those special characters. That way, someone else can walk in your footsteps, and avoid the frustration that you are feeling right now. (Sorry, but we just don't have the knowledge you're asking for.)


Here's some relevant pages where people discuss how to solve this problem.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/For...ccess-database

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/For...nicode-strings

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=...ng/zERh8D5oAf0

http://vietunicode.sourceforge.net/h...taccessdb.html

http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/no-...-t1102041.html

http://accessblog.net/2007/06/how-to...-files-in.html


And here's a link to the other thread, with the background I worked up last week.

https://www.accessforums.net/forms/p...ess-35979.html