About language drivers

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dBASE Plus uses language drivers to specify which character set to use and which language rules apply to that character set. For example, the Canadian French language driver uses a character set that is identical to code page 863, while the default driver for the United States uses a character set that is identical to code page 437. It is important to understand that dBASE Plus uses these internal code pages instead of the code pages supplied by the operating system.

dBASE Plus language drivers contain tables that define or control the following for a particular character set:

Alphabetic characters

Rules for upper- and lowercase

Collation (sort order) used in sorting or indexing

String comparisons (=, <, >, <=, >=)

Soundex values (values that represent phonetic matches when exact spellings are not known)

Rules for translation between OEM and ANSI character sets

dBASE Plus identifies each driver with a character string known as an internal name. For example, the internal name of the German driver for code page 850 is DB850DE0, and the internal name of the Finnish language driver is DB437FI0. The following table lists some of the European language drivers available in dBASE Plus.

When dBASE Plus converts data from OEM to ANSI, and vice versa, most alphabetic characters exist in both an OEM code page and the ANSI character set and are converted without problem. Most of the extended graphic symbols in an OEM code page cannot be represented in the ANSI character set at all. When such a discrepancy exists, dBASE Plus, like other standard Windows applications, makes a guess at the nearest character, but data loss can occur.