Allowing controlled use of Chinese text

Question

Hello, I'm overseeing the overhaul an asp.old web app for order entry into .net. So far easy enough, the project has taken an interesting turn, in that I also need to ensure that it can support data entry of Chinese text.

Am just looking at data entry for now.

I've hit a snag in that there are conditions when data entry must only be allowed in English (when an order involves countries outside of China), and other conditions where entry in Chinese etc is allowed (when the order is local only).

Database is currently singlebyte storage. Any suggestions on how I can accomodate this? Current thoughts are i) Maintain a seperate, multibyte database for the Chinese text. ii). Javascript on the frontpage to enforce latin text only...

Naturally I've short timescales - I've only made it as far as page 11 of CJKV. Any guidance will be gratefully accepted! Thanks.

Answer 1

I'd move it all to UTF8, this will keep your ASCII as single byte, and allow you to enter any language (maybe you'll need to add French, German, Japanese, Korean)....

You can detect chinese characters in your unicode, and display an error message if the country isn't china/hongkong/taiwan. I'd also make this extensible to other languages and countries.