Not all documents may be converted to Unicode by using simple character sets. Some of them are stored in so-called "multibyte" encodings. It means that every letter (or ideograph) is represented as a sequence of one or more bytes, not by exactly one byte. The conversion from such representation to Unicode and back is usually significantly slower than simple transformation via character sets, so these representations are supported by data import operations only, but not by internal RDBMS routines.

The Virtuoso Server "knows" some number of built-in encodings, such as UTF-8, UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE. It can load additional encoding descriptions from a "UCM" file, and can automatically create a new encoding from a known charset with the same name. See the UCM Encodings section for more details.

An encoding may be used in the following places:

You can only use character sets, not encodings as an ODBC connection character set, as a character set attribute of a column of a database table, as an output encoding of the built-in XSLT processor (it is for future versions). UTF-8 is an exception, it is supported in many places where other encodings are not.

Security Note:

Two strings converted to Unicode may be identical, but this does not guarantee that their source strings were equal byte-by-byte due to the nature of some encodings. For this reason you should avoid processing authorization data that are neither in Unicode nor in one of the standard character sets (single-byte encodings). Multibyte encodings and user-defined character sets may be unsafe for such purposes.

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UCM Encodings

The description of a multibyte encodings is much longer than the description of a character set. It is inconvenient to keep such amounts of data inside the executable. Virtuoso can load descriptions of required encodings from external files in UCM format. Every UCM file describes one encoding.

Virtuoso loads UCM files at system initialization. The list of UCM files is kept in the Virtuoso INI file under a section called [Ucms]. This section should contain a UcmPath parameter and one or more parameters with names Ucm1, Ucm2, Ucm3 and so on (up to Ucm99).

The UcmPath parameter specifies the directory where UCM files are located, and every UcmNN parameter specifies the name of a UCM file to load and a list of names that the encoding can be identified by the <?xml ... encoding="..." ?> XML preamble. A vertical bar character is used to delimit names in the list.

Example15.16.Sample [Ucms] Section

[Ucms]
UcmPath = /usr/local/javalib/ucm
Ucm1 = java-Cp933-1.3-P.ucm,Cp933
Ucm2 = java-Cp949-1.3-P.ucm,Cp949|Korean

This section describes two UCM files located in /usr/local/javalib/ucm directory: data from java-Cp933-1.3-P.ucm will be used for documents in the 'Cp933' encoding; data from java-Cp949-1.3-P.ucm will be used for documents in the 'Cp949' encoding and for documents in the 'Korean' encoding (because these two names refers to the same encoding).

	Note:
	The encoding name specified inside the UCM file itself is not used.

The Virtuoso server will log the results of processing each UCM file specified in the Virtuoso INI file. If a UCM file specified is not found or contains syntax errors, the error is logged, otherwise only the type and name(s) of the encoding are logged.

	Note:
	If the virtuoso.ini contains a misspelled name of a parameter or section, the parameter (or a whole section) is ignored without being reported as an error. It is always wise to verify that the log contains a record about the encoding(s) you load.

See Also:

UCM files can be found freely from various sites concerning the "International Components for Unicode" project, such as: IBM ICU Homepage or the IBM UCM files directory . The C Interface chapter contains further information regarding user customizable support for new encodings and languages. For almost all tasks, it is enough to define a new charset or to load an additional UCM file, but some special tasks may require writing additional C code.

If an XML document contains the encoding parameter in its

<?xml ... ?>

prolog declaration, it will be properly decoded and converted into UTF-8, so the application code is free from encoding problems. If the value of this attribute is the name of a pre-set or user-defined character set, that character set will be used. Virtuoso will recognize names such as UTF-8 and UTF8 as multi-character or special encodings. Virtuoso recognizes both official names and aliases.

If an encoding is not specified in an XML prolog, or if the document contains no prolog, the default encoding will be used to read the document. If a built-in SQL function invokes the XML parser, it will have an optional argument parser_mode to specify whether source text should be parsed as strict XML or as HTML. If the source text is 8-bit, then UTF-8 will be used as the default encoding for "XML mode", and ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) will be the default for "HTML mode". If the source text is of some wide-character type, Unicode is the default. To make another encoding the default, you may specify its official or alias name as the content_encoding argument of a built-in function you call.

Sometimes applications should perform XPath queries using the encoding specified by a client. For example, a search engine may ask a user to specify a pattern to search and use the browser's current encoding as a hint to parse the pattern properly. In such cases you may wish to use the __enc XPath option to specify the encoding used for the rest of XPath string:

create table ENC_XML_SAMPLE (
  ID integer,
  XPER long varchar,
  primary key (ID)
);

insert into ENC_XML_SAMPLE (ID, XPER)


values (
  1,
  xml_persistent ('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="WINDOWS-1251" ?>
    <book><cit>Îí äîáàâèë
      êàðòîøêè,
    ïîñîëèë è
    ïîñòàâèë
    àêâàðèóì íà
    îãîíü
    (Ì.Æâàíåöêèé
    )</cit></book>'
  )
);
...
  

select ID from ENC_XML_SAMPLE where
  xcontains (XPER, '[__enc ''KOI8-R''] //cit[text-contains(.,
  "''ÐÏÓÔÁ×ÉÌ
    ÁË×ÁÒÉÕÍ
    ÎÁ ÏÇÏÎØ''")]');

Like XML applications, free text searching may have encoding problems, and Virtuoso offers a similar solution for them.

Both the CREATE TEXT INDEX statement and vt_create_text_index() Virtuoso/PL procedure have an optional argument to specify the encoding of the indexed data. The specified encoding will be applied to all source text documents (if the TEXT INDEX was created), or to all XML documents that have no encoding attribute of the sort <?xml ... encoding="..." ?> (if the TEXT XML INDEX was created).

The option __enc may be specified at the beginning of free text search pattern, even if the pattern is inside an XPath statement:

create table ENC_TEXT_SAMPLE (
  ID integer,
  TEXT long nvarchar,
  primary key (ID)
);

insert into ENC_TEXT_SAMPLE (ID, XPER)


values (
  1,
  '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="WINDOWS-1251" ?>
Îí äîáàâèë
    êàðòîøêè,
    ïîñîëèë è
    ïîñòàâèë
    àêâàðèóì
    íà îãîíü
    (Ì.Æâàíåöêèé')
);
...

select ID from ENC_SAMPLE where
  contains (TEXT, '[__enc ''KOI8-R'']
    "ÐÏÓÔÁ×ÉÌ
    ÁË×ÁÒÉÕÍ
    ÎÁ ÏÇÏÎØ"'
  );

select ID from ENC_XML_SAMPLE where
  xcontains (XPER, '//cit[text-contains(., "[__enc ''KOI8-R'']
    ''ÐÏÓÔÁ×ÉÌ
    ÁË×ÁÒÉÕÍ ÎÁ
    ÏÇÏÎØ''")]'
  );

	Note:
	You may have free-text a expression written as a literal constant: e.g. if the argument of text-contains XPath function is a literal constant. Be careful to not declare the __enc twice, once in the beginning of the whole XPath expression and then again in the beginning of the free-text expression constant, because words of the text expression will thus be converted twice.