[MisterTea]

> Is their database a 7-bit database?

Ascii is 7 bits. What people think of as 8-bit ASCII is actually code page 437, the alternate characters added to the PC BIOS in the original IBM PC. Like UTF-8 it uses the most significant bit in a 1 byte ASCII char to determine if it should use a character from ASCII if 0 or the extended 437 characters which includes ü if 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437

[umanwizard]

Do people think of this as 8-bit ASCII ? I've never heard of it referred to ASCII until now. In fact, I've never heard of it at all (by the time I was old enough to know what a character encoding was, Latin-1 and Windows-1252 were totally dominant IIRC).

[int_19h]

In DOS days, codepage 437 was commonly referred to as "ASCII" colloquially in countries where some other encoding was in use for the national script.

[umanwizard]

Interesting to know, thanks!

[MisterTea]

Yup, what the GP said. It was a common mistake for people to assume ASCII included CP 437 characters back in the DOS days. Even I made that assumption when I was a kid.