Can the English version of LabVIEW 7.0 support Chinese text strings?

[cpuwzd]

I have developed an application using LabVIEW 6.1 in English. I am expecting to upgrade to LabVIEW 7.0. Will I be able to handle strings in Chinese? I am using Windows 2000. Will I need to use the Chines version of Windows 2000? Will I need a Chinese version of LabVIEW? Will I still be able to use English text? What about input strings?

[Evan]

You can display and use Chinese characters in LabVIEW 7.0 and the English version of windows. LabVIEW supports multi-byte characters, thus the support for Chinese.

However LabVIEW does not support uni-code, so yes you can have Chinese and English characters in your VI. But you can not have Chinese and English characters in the same string. See the attached jpg where I just hit a bunch of keys in the two languages.

To do what I did you must have windows regional settings set up to be in Chinese, and then you can use Window's language toolbar to change between English and Chinese.

[cpuwzd]

Evan,

Thanks for your reply. If you can't mix English and Chinese in the same string, where does the responsibility lie to keep track of which language has been used?

If you are not using a Chinese operating system, where did you get your Chinese fonts and your input method editor?

I am storing my text using the Jet database engine. I am concerned about whether I need to do MBCS<->Unicode translations between LabVIEW and Jet and about the concept of sorting. There is even the issue of possibly wanting to sort strings when some strings are in English and some strings are in Chinese. I use binary searches of character strings converted to lower case to try to mimic the collating sequence used by Jet. This sounds like a significant problem. Is the
re a Chinese version of Jet that is required to get some kind of Chinese collating sequence? What happens when you try to also store English in the same database?

This is feeling really ugly!

[Evan]

LabVIEW uses Multi-Byte strings, which as I understand it means that there are just more values available to a string. So for example if "A" is value 65 then you may have another language character as 400. Notice I said that another langueage, because it is not specific to any language.
When the character is going to be displayed a lookup table is used to know what image matches the character. So when you set windows up to use Chinese then you will see a chinese character, now if you change windows to another language those characters will be displayed instead. In either case the english characters should show up fine, because the bottom byte of the look up tables hold the English characters.

Here is a link to a KB that discusses this a little
.
Does LabVIEW 6 Offer Multilingual Support?