Aravind NagaVenkata Gorthy repeated himself: > Dear All > Could any one tell me what all the chages I have to make in > order > to make my existing (english version) of MySQL database > compatable > to the Japanese language.
So I repeat myself: Boy. That's a tough one. I'm really not sure what you want to know. Do you want to convert the whole thing to Japanese for a Japanese-only audience? Do you want to have a Japanese version of you database that is structured the same as your English version? Do you want to store both Japanese and English together? Do you want to be able to search and sort the Japanese data? Or would it be enough to store Japanese data? Or do you simply want to show the English data in Japanese web pages? Do you know which encoding your tools use? Do you know which encoding you'll be getting most of your data in? Do you need a discussion of what the web environment is like over here, so you can base your decision about character encoding on that? I can throw some random information at you. (You know, shot-in-the-dark.) The settings necessary to sort and search in a different language are explained in section 4.6 of the manual. Is there something there you don't understand? Let's see. If you plan to search and sort Japanese, you'll need extra pronunciation (kana) fields. Sorting on Kanji does not give results that the average Japanese person will think very useful. There are three families of character encoding in common use in Japan, JIS, euc-JIS (*NIX), and shift-JIS (PC/ClassicMac/etc.). Unicode is not (yet?) commonly used in Japan, but converters exist, and mostly give good results. MySQL seems to support euc-JIS best. It does not yet support Unicode or straight-JIS for searching and sorting, athough you would be able to store them okay. We are using MySQL with shift-JIS in house, but I'm not sure how well the searching and sorting work. Shift-JIS is a pain to parse, by the way, and I'm sure that's why MySQL doesn't fully support it yet. Incidentally, JIS includes a base Latin character set, but that character set can only be viewed with Japanese fonts. Shift-JIS and euc-JIS both include two Latin character sets, one of which is (almost) 7-bit ASCII. JIS is constant 16-bits wide, and shift-JIS and euc-JIS are both multi-byte, so you can actually (sort of) mix Japanese and English using shift-JIS or euc-JIS, and there is a moderate probability of the English being legible in an English font. But we don't know if any of that is meaningful to you, because we don't know what you want to do. We don't know what tools you have, what character sets they work with, etc. And we don't even know for sure if you are going to try to keep English and Japanese together in one database, or if you plan to separate the databases so you don't have to mess too much with keeping the browser environments and character encodings and database structure straight. So, please, ask us a question we can answer. Joel Rees Alps Giken Kansai Systems Develoment Suita, Osaka --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
