On Nov 28, 2006, at 10:00 AM, Rowland Carson wrote:
Anyway, bottom line is that whatever I do has to work on MySQL 4.0.24.
If I recall correctly MySQL did not add Unicode support until 4.1. MySQL 4.0 and earlier defaulted to the Latin1 character set for storage, collation, and ordering. However MySQL will import Tab delimited files and, as Biti mentioned, FMP supports UTF-8 encoding for Tab export. If you can deploy on MySQL 4.1 or later you might be in luck.
While you can technically store UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 in a VARCHAR field (you need a VARCHAR because otherwise MySQL will allocate storage on a 1 char = 1 byte basis), if you rely on the database to order the records you may have inconsistent results. If, on the other hand, you do all of the heavy lifting in PHP then you're okay. Except I seem to recall that PHP doesn't support UTF in any version.
You may still be okay. Even without UCS support you can store the data in MySQL and retrieve it with PHP just as long as you don't manipulate it with either and leave it to the web browser to display (remember to set the content type _header_ for the HTML output to UTF-8).
Corn Walker Hatfield, MA "Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
