How to know what language is it in a record

rolwong

There is a column in my MySQL table, users are allowed to enter either English or Chinese letters. I would like to know how can I know which language is it in a selected record?

My situation is:
I would select the first 30 letters if the record is english OR I would only select the first 10 letters (chinese letter) if the record is in Chinese.

** My testing was one chinese letter used 3 Bytes to store.

helz

not sure on a specific method, but you could do a simple strpos() test with a chinese character as the needle, i think it would be wise to choose a very common chinese character to maximise the chance of the check working...

$check = strpos($infofromdb,"‰ä");
if ($check == 0){
  //if check = 0 then english be the language
} else {
  //check holds the postition of the character so its in chinese
}

There probably is a better way

AstroTeg

I done this, but not for this particular purpose: similar to what Helz said, but just check for an extended ASCII character (any ASCII character above 127). This may not be 100% fool proof...

helz

well when ive done a bit of c++ the actual ASCII hexdec changed from os to os, but i guess it should be the one that the server uses. like you saw in my previous post, that character was a chinese one on my computer but it appears as two characters when displayed in this forum...
will need to do some research into this to get it right