Everhart, Glenn
From:	Joshua Cope [cope@star.enet.dec.com]
Sent:	Wednesday, February 03, 1999 9:10 AM
To:	Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com
Subject:	ODS-5 supported character set [was: ;32767]
JF Mezei wrote:

> Would files such as "Menu.pour.le.petit.déjeuner.com" work properly ?
>
> (eg: accented characters). Will they be escaped out, or will they appear
> properly on a character cell terminal ? Will pathworks do proper translation
> of character sets between VMS, WINDOWS, DOS and MACs when displaying/handling
> file names ?

All of this is covered in great detail in the documentation, for those of
you who have received version 7.2, or have one of the SDK (or field test)
CDs. But I might as well get the relevant stuff into DejaNews... this
thread is becoming a series of specific questions, and I seem to remember
the same sort of questions a couple of months ago, and back around v7.2-FT1.

So, here's the entire list of supported characters, and the rules for what
is escaped and what's not. [Hit "Next" now if you couldn't care less.]

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OpenVMS Guide to Extended File Specifications, Appendix B
Section 2.1.2: Additional Characters

On ODS-5 volumes, RMS supports access to files and directories with names that
contain arbitrary 8-bit characters, except for the C0 control set (hexadecimal
00 through 1F) and the following characters:

     Double quotation marks (")
     Asterisk (*)
     Backslash (\)
     Colon (:)
     Left and right angle brackets (< >)
     Slash (/)
     Question mark (?)
     Vertical bar (|)

Note that this explicitly includes both the C1 character set (hex 80-9F) as well
as graphical and other characters between 9F and FF. This allows the entire ISO
Latin-1 character set (with the 7-bit character exclusions noted above) and any
defined Unicode character.

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Section 2.2.6: Canonical Form of File Specifications

In some cases, there are multiple ways to write the same characters. For example,
^20, ^ , and ^_ are all equivalent. When RMS outputs a file specification (as a
resultant name, for example), it follows these rules to determine which form to
use:

     Any character that cannot be represented with eight bits is represented
     as ^Uxxxx, where xxxx is four hexadecimal digits. Space is represented as
     the escape character followed by an underscore (^_). Other ISO Latin-1
     8-bit characters that have no graphical representation or which are used for

     control functions by other OpenVMS software or by terminals is represented
     by an escape character followed by two hexadecimal digits (^xx). Otherwise,
     it is represented by its own character. The following 8-bit values are
output
     as an escape character followed by two hexadecimal digits.
          7F (rubout)
          80-9F (C1 control characters)
          A0 (nonbreaking space)
          FF (Latin small letter y diaeresis)

     If the file specification is longer than 255 bytes and must be output
     through a NAM block, a DID or FID abbreviation is used.

     The following characters are output preceded by the escape character (^):
          Exclamation point (!)
          Pound sign (#)
          Ampersand (&)
          Apostrophe (')
          Grave accent (`)
          Left parenthesis (()
          Right parenthesis ())
          Plus sign (+)
          Atsign (@)
          Left brace ({)
          Right brace (})
          Period (.)
          Comma (,)
          Semicolon (;)
          Left bracket ([)
          Right bracket (])
          Percent sign (%)
          Circumflex (^)
          Equal sign (=)

------

Hopefully that's enough to hold anyone over until the docsets arrive
and you can read it for yourself ;)

  Joshua Cope
  OpenVMS Quality, Test & Validation

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