With the commands described in the previous section it is possible to transport document files with 8-bit characters systemwide.
If you transport files over the internet, however, that somewhere on the way these characters get converted or changed. This would be fatal with soruce files using more than one character code set.
To enable the exchange of files in this case, UDO offers a
universal character set
. This is not really a character set,
but a way to emulate 8-bit characters by using a sequence of several
7-bit characters.
Since the necessary queries and conversions are quite
computer-bound, you have to tell that the following contain
universal characters
. This is done by using the switch
!universal_charset.
After using !universal_charset [on] UDO will look at every input line and converts universal characters to 8-bit characters. The following table shows which input sequences are converted to which characters:
| Placeholder | x from | Example | Result |
| (!"x) | AEIOUaeiosuy | (!"a) | = (!"a) |
| (!'x) | AEIOUYaeiouy | (!'e) | = (!'e) |
| (!`x) | AEIOUaeiou | (!`i) | = (!`i) |
| (!^x) | AEIOUaeiou | (!^o) | = (!^o) |
| (!&x) | AE, OE, ae, oe | (!&AE) | = (!&AE) |
| (!~x) | ANOano | (!~n) | = (~n) |
| (!,x) | Cc | (!,C) | = (!,C) |
| (!.x) | Aa | (!.A) | = (!.A) |
| (!_x) | ao | (!_a) | = (!_a) |
| (!_x) | !? | (!_?) | = (!_?) |
| (!\x) | Oo | (!\O) | = (!\O) |
| (!/x) | Oo | (!/o) | = (!o) |
| (!#x) | PS | (!#S) | = (!#S) |
The german (!"s)
will be created with the placeholder
(!"s). If the destination format does not know a character, the best
possible character will be used, for example a
instead of
(!^a)
.