Is EDIFACT UNOY charset the official code for UTF-8?

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Alexander

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Sep 24, 2021, 10:33:59 AM9/24/21
to Bots Open Source EDI Translator
Hi all,

we have a lot of partners that are sending and/or expecting UTF-8 encoded EDIFACT files but with UNOC as charset in UNB.

Therefore I am wondering if this is just a semi-official code or are they all disregarding the EDIFACT specifications?

For sure it is super annoying and causes a lot of issues for us.


Best regards
Alexander

Eppye Bots

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Sep 24, 2021, 10:46:17 AM9/24/21
to 'Chuck Turco' via Bots Open Source EDI Translator
UNOC is ISO-8859-1.
UTF = UNOY (I think).
so yes, they disregard.
let them send UNOY (please check if that is indeed the right one, I did not look that up()


kind regards, Henk-Jan Ebbers


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HC

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Sep 24, 2021, 5:53:40 PM9/24/21
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Yes, we have also had a number of problems with partners specifying UNOC but using UTF-8, or sometimes Windows-1252.

UNOY is UTF-8 but only supports single octet characters.
UNOW is UTF-8 with multi-octet support (1-6 bytes per character I think).

I think anything above UNOK requires Syntax version 4 (UNB+UNOY:4), intead of v3.

List of encoding values -

Eppye Bots

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Sep 27, 2021, 11:37:28 AM9/27/21
to 'Chuck Turco' via Bots Open Source EDI Translator
not sure about the details.
UNOY supports chinese characters, and  a lot more?
but having edi-patners send UTF-8 and not telling is a pain in the ass.
it that in production?
I often see 'test' edifact files encoded as UTF-8, bu mostly because windows users opened a file with 'some' program' and saved it....as UTF-8.

kind regards, Henk-Jan Ebbers


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Alexander

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Sep 27, 2021, 12:03:52 PM9/27/21
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Yes, some of our partners are sending (or expecting) UTF-8 encoded files with UNOC in production.
So not just a manual mistake during tests, unfortunately.

@HC:
Thanks for the input and the links.
But I think your point "UNOY is UTF-8 but only supports single octet characters." can not be true as this would mean that most special chars would not be supported in UNOY too.
For example our German ä, ö and ü consist of 2 bytes in UTF-8 and are supported in UNOY.
At least in Bots but no one complained so far either, so I hope it is fine.
Hopefully I am not the one who disregards the specifications... ;-)

I do not understand the difference between UNOY and UNOW then though.
I will try to look that up tomorrow.


Best regards
Alexander

Eppye Bots

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Sep 27, 2021, 12:07:43 PM9/27/21
to 'Chuck Turco' via Bots Open Source EDI Translator
not sure if it helps,
but in bots.ini aliasses are given for edifact charsets in section
[charsets]


kind regards, Henk-Jan Ebbers


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