I don't know if this help at all, but I have a translation program but unlike what you are doing, translating in code, I have all the chars for the different languages in tables. Foxpro will store tham correctly and they appear fine.

My code just finds them and uses them accordingly.

Mathias
>Hi all,
>First of, Happy New Year to all.
>
>Now, my question: What is the best practice on mapping international characters in code?
>
>Problem: We have a program that creates an XML file output. As such, international characters have to be transformed to its equivalent in &#xxx; format. We hard-code each character that we wanted to transform. However, the more complex characters like Й (cyrillic) or Ğ (turkish) doesn't show properly in the VFP editor. The formatting code looks like this:
>

>xmlText = strtran(xmlText, 'ç', 'ç') && small c with cedilla
>*edited: UT converted the code; the 3rd parameter is "& # 2 3 1 ;" without the spaces.
>

>I cannot type in the two characters listed above in the second parameter of the strtran() function inside the VFP editor. I've tried setting: _screen.FontCharSet = 162 for Turkish and 204 for Russian and used the Windows On-Screen keyboard to type it in but the literal text Й (cyrillic) or Ğ (turkish) does not display properly.