Hi,
I needed some information regarding multi-byte encoding.
We are doing an upgrade from 6.1 to 6.5. There is one change in “WmFlatFile package” as per 6.5 ocumentation. The lengths used for parsing are now(in 6.5) based on bytes but not characters. So places where single byte encoding(one character=1 byte) is used is okay. But for multi byte encoded(one char=multiple bytes) files it will be a problem. My query is

• How do i find which encoding will be used by my IS
• How will it be decided if the file is encoded in multi-byte of single-byte. Can i set it for single byte encoding?

thx in advance
-sj

Copying the content from “webMethods_Flat_File_Schema_Developers_Guide_6.5.pdf” for reference::
“As of Version 6.5 of the WmFlatFile package, this parser measures the lengths and positions of records in terms of bytes, rather than characters. Prior to Version 6.5,the parser measured lengths and positions in terms of characters. This change will not affect users who currently parse/compose flat files using single-byte encodings
because one byte equals one character. In this case, there is no functional difference between specifying bytes or characters.”

So my query again. How do set/find th ebyte encoding for my flat file parsing operations

well i am really confused here…i did some RnD in the past few days and was basically trying to simulate the issue but could not. Can anyone suggest few ideas here.
I tied parsing one file in webMethods 6.5 using one simple schema. Even despite what i thot i entered were double byte charactes, the parser was treating them for one position.
My records in the file were like this
recü12345678ö
rec1ü234567ä8
as per what i came to know the characters ö,ü ,ä are multi byte characters. So if i have a schema with fields f1,f2 defined with extractor positions 3-8 and 8-13 then the parser should cause issues if it treats the special characters as multi byte. The default encoding in IS is UTF-8 and UTF-8 treats the above mentioned characters as multi byte ones. The output i was getting was
f1=ü1234 f2=5678ö
f1=1ü234 f2=567ä8

will appreciate any thots here…

-sk