When You Do Not Need the Internationalization Module
You do not need the Internationalization Module if you know you will be building streams in one of the following encodings:
*UTF-8
*US-ASCII
*ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1, a superset of US-ASCII)
*UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE
(“BE” and “LE” signify “big endian” or “little endian” and refer to how bytes in a multibyte string are sorted when converted to a numeric representation. Big endian places the most significant byte at the lowest address, storing the “big end first.” By contrast, little endian places the least significant bytes at lower addresses, storing the “little end first.” The default for UTF-16 is BE, unless specified otherwise.)
SourcePro’s regular string and stream processing classes can accommodate these five encodings without linking the Internationalization Module.
The Advanced Tools Module also contains classes to support converting streams between UTF-8 and UTF-16. For more information, see Unicode Converter Classes in this chapter.
If you need conversion to and from other encodings, or more advanced manipulation of strings in UTF-16, you will want to use the Internationalization Module.