dBASE Plus uses language drivers to specify which character set to use and which language rules apply to that character set. For example, the Canadian French language driver uses a character set that is identical to code page 863, while the default driver for the United States uses a character set that is identical to code page 437. It is important to understand that dBASE Plus uses these internal code pages instead of the code pages supplied by the operating system.

dBASE Plus language drivers contain tables that define or control the following for a particular character set:

Alphabetic characters

Rules for upper- and lowercase

Collation (sort order) used in sorting or indexing

String comparisons (=, <, >, <=, >=)

Soundex values (values that represent phonetic matches when exact spellings are not known)

Rules for translation between OEM and ANSI character sets

dBASE Plus identifies each driver with a character string known as an internal name. For example, the internal name of the German driver for code page 850 is DB850DE0, and the internal name of the Finnish language driver is DB437FI0. The following table lists some of the European language drivers available in dBASE Plus.

Language or country

Code page

Internal name

Portuguese/Brazil

850

DB850PT0

Portuguese/Portugal

860

DB860PT0

Danish

865

DB865DA0

Finnish

437

DB437FI0

French/Canada

850

DB850CF0

French/Canada

863

DB863CF1

German

437

DB437DE0

Italian

437

DB437IT0

Netherlands

437

DB437NL0

Norway

865

DB865NO0

Spanish

437

DB437ES1

Spanish

ANSI

DBWINES0

Swedish

437

DB437SV0

English/UK

437

DB437UK0

English/UK

850

DB850UK0

English/USA

437

DB437US0

English/USA

ANSI

DBWINUS0

W. European

ANSI

DBWINWE0

When dBASE Plus converts data from OEM to ANSI, and vice versa, most alphabetic characters exist in both an OEM code page and the ANSI character set and are converted without problem. Most of the extended graphic symbols in an OEM code page cannot be represented in the ANSI character set at all. When such a discrepancy exists, dBASE Plus, like other standard Windows applications, makes a guess at the nearest character, but data loss can occur.