Hi, I've been wondering a bit about how Firebird handles transliteration of various parts of a query, in particular regarding (quoted) identifiers.
My situation is that I have a database with default charset UTF8 and all char/varchar columns use this charset. I also always use UTF8 as connection charset. I would assume that this means that Firebird expects to receive query strings encoded in UTF8, including identifiers and string literals that appear in the query. At the same time, I know that the identifiers are stored in columns with charset Unicode_FSS, which as far as understand is identical with UTF8 except 1) it will accept malformed strings and 2) it will allocate a buffer that's fits 4 x maxlength bytes and will accept any string that fits in that buffer even if the number of Unicode characters > maxlength. Are there any other differences between Unicode_FSS and UTF8? Are all valid UTF8 strings < maxlength identical with the corresponding Unicode_FSS string? Also, string literals can be specified to be some other charset than UTF8 - does this mean that the query buffer sent to the server actually contains segments with different encodings? Or is the query buffer always 100% encoded in the connection charest? I tried this with UTF8 connection charset: select _win1252 'asdfö' "Test" from rdb$database It returns this: asdfö So, it seems the string literal is encoded in UTF8 and sent that way to the server, which interprets it as encoded in WIN1252. So, it seems the buffer itself is 100% UTF8. Right? What about identifiers? Assume I have an identifier "Åäöü€ÉÈÏÿñ". Is there any instance that Firebird could get into trouble with this assuming I always quote it and always use UTF8 connection charset?
