User Guide

Setting Up the NetWare Server 27
Server Operating System Administration Guide
103-000148-001
August 30, 2001
Novell Confidential
Manual 99a38 July 17, 2001
replaced with a symbol such as a heart. In the past, these substituted characters
might have caused a database such as Novell eDirectory to fail to recognize
objects.
To help resolve these problems, a convention called Unicode* has been
adopted.
Using Unicode
Unicode is a 16-bit character representation, defined by the Unicode
Consortium, that supports up to 65,536 unique characters. Unicode allows the
characters for multiple languages to be represented using a single Unicode
representation.
Any character that your code page does not understand is substituted in your
display by the 4-digit hexadecimal value of the Unicode character, surrounded
by square brackets, for example: [00FF]
Because eDirectory supports Unicode, substituted characters do not prevent
eDirectory from recognizing an object. For example, your company’s
European office might create an Organizational Unit object to represent
Finance in western Europe. They might use DOS code page 852 to make the
generic currency symbol a part of the object name (OU=¤W-Euro).
When this object is accessed in the United States, using DOS code page 437
or Windows 95 code page 1252, the currency symbol (¤) is replaced by square
brackets surrounding the Unicode number for the currency symbol, [00A4].
eDirectory recognizes the Unicode number, so the object can still be opened
and accessed.
However, the object name (containing the square brackets and unicode
number) will be difficult for users to understand. If the name is too difficult to
interpret, the only solution is to determine which code page was used to create
the object and then view the object using that code page. Changing code pages
can be troublesome; see “Changing Code Pages” on page 29 for guidelines.
The following table shows ranges of Unicode numbers, with a description of
each range and a list of code pages that might be used to view the character
correctly. However, switching to one of the suggested code pages does not
guarantee that you will see the correct results. For example, characters in the
range 4E00-9FFF (Han Ideographs) are used in Japan, China, and Korea. But
switching to code page 932 (Japanese) does not display the character correctly
if the character is used only in China.