ASA Database Administration Guide
International Languages and Character Sets
Understanding collations
This section describes how multibyte character sets are handled. The description applies to the supported collations and to any multibyte custom collations you may create.
Adaptive Server Anywhere provides collations using several multibyte character sets.
For more information, see Understanding collations.
Adaptive Server Anywhere supports variable width 8-bit character sets. In these sets, some characters are represented by one byte, and some by more than one, to a maximum of four bytes. The value of the first byte in any character indicates the number of bytes used for that character, and also indicates whether the character is a space character, a digit, or an alphabetic (alpha) character.
For the UTF8 collation, UTF-8 characters are represented by one to four bytes. For other multibyte collations, one or two bytes are used. For all provided multibyte collations, characters comprising two or more bytes are considered to be "alphabetic", such that they can be used in identifiers without requiring double quotes.
Adaptive Server Anywhere does not support 16-bit or 32-bit character sets such as UTF-16 or UTF-32.
All client libraries other than Embedded SQL are Unicode-enabled, using the UTF-16 encoding. Translation occurs between the client and the server.