INFO: DBCS Enabled/Localized FoxPro Products in Far East Region

• Microsoft FoxPro for Windows, versions 2.5, 2.5a, 2.5b, 2.6, 2.6a
• Microsoft Visual FoxPro for Windows, versions 3.0, 3.0b, 5.0, 5.0a

SUMMARY

This article lists Double-Byte Character Set (DBCS) Enabled/Localized FoxPro versions for the Far East Region.

DBCS-enabled means the version of FoxPro is capable of handling double-byte characters. Localized means the version of FoxPro is a DBCS version and it displays localized languages on menus, controls, error messages, and Help files.

The Double-Byte Character Set (DBCS) is a character encoding mechanism that accommodates ideographic characters used in Far Eastern languages.

Characters in DBCS can be addressed using a 16-bit notation using two bytes, or double-byte, unlike Single-Byte Character Sets (SBCS), which can only represent at most 256 characters in one byte. With 16-bit notation, you can represent 65,536 (2^16) characters.

DBCS code pages contain both single and double-byte characters. The DBCS single-byte characters conform to the 8-bit national standards for each country and correspond closely to the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character set.

In a double-byte character set, certain ranges of code-points are designated as leading bytes. A leading byte, together with the following byte, represents a single character. This second byte is called the trailing byte or trail-byte. Each DBCS has a different set of lead-byte ranges and trail-byte ranges. Unlike leading bytes, trail-bytes in some DBCS' can overlap with the 7-bit ASCII character set.

For example, the Shift Japan Industry Standard (JIS) character set has a trail-byte range of 0x40H-0xFEH. That means a byte holding the value of 0x7DH can represent the second half of a Kanji character, not necessarily a close brace character(}).

MORE INFORMATION

                            Korean   Japanese    Simplify  Traditional
                                                 Chinese    Chinese
   ======================================================================

   Foxpro 2.5
   Foxpro 2.5a
   Foxpro 2.5b                D          D          D          D
   Foxpro 2.6
   Foxpro 2.6a
   Visual FoxPro 3.0
   Visual FoxPro 3.0a         D          D          D          D
   Visual FoxPro 3.0b         DL         DL         DL         DL
   Visual FoxPro 5.0          D          D          D          D
   Visual FoxPro 5.0a         DL         D          DL         DL

   D: "DBCS Enabled"
   L: "Localized"