This release includes support for the new European Union currency,
the euro. In order for the JDK software's support for the
euro character
to function properly, you may need to install euro-support patches for
your operating system. For Windows NT and Windows 95, you can
obtain the required patches from the
Microsoft euro support
web page. No patch is required for Windows 98.
Euro-support patches are also required if you are using versions of
Solaris prior to Solaris 7.
See the Solaris patches web page for information on the Solaris patches
required for euro support.
The addition of euro support will not affect existing code, except for
character conversion code that relies on changed encodings. No APIs
were changed.
Encodings and Euro Support
The following encodings have been modified to support the euro currency
character. Code point 0x88 was modified on Cp1251, code point 0x80 on
all the other encodings. These code points were previously unused.
Cp874
Windows Thai
Cp1250
Windows Eastern European
Cp1251
Windows Cyrillic
Cp1252
Windows Latin-1
Cp1253
Windows Greek
Cp1254
Windows Turkish
Cp1255
Windows Hebrew
Cp1256
Windows Arabic
Cp1257
Windows Baltic
Cp1258
Windows Vietnamese
There are also 12 new encodings. Of special interest is ISO8859_15.
This encoding supports ISO 8859-15, a character set standard not yet
approved. ISO 8859-15 is ISO 8859-1 with various changes, including
accented French and Finish characters and the euro currency symbol.
ISO 8859-15 is also known as Latin 9, Latin 0, and IBM 923.
Before JDK 1.1.7, the default encoding under Microsoft Windows for
Western European locales was ISO8859_1. Starting with JDK 1.1.7, the
default encoding for Western European Locales under Microsoft Windows
has been changed to Cp1252. Cp1252 does not implement a reversible
byte/character translation. It may appear to some programmers that this
introduces an incompatibility. The real problem is a programming
technique that unintentionally relies on the features of specific
locales.
No existing locale resources have been modified for the euro. Instead,
new variant locale resources are provided for each country adopting the
euro. Previously, there were no Luxembourg locale resources. In this
release, Luxembourg gets both base and euro variant locales.
Since the Java 1.1 platform specification is frozen, no API was added
to find the euro variant of a non-euro locale. The following example
code locates the euro variant of a non-euro locale. This example
assumes that only the locale resources provided with the Java
Development Kit are available. A more general solution would be much
more complicated.