unicode non-English support in MySQL

[beuntzer]

The environment:

Windows 2000 Pro SP4
Apache 1.3
Zend Studio Server 3.0.0
PHP 4.3.2
MySQL 4.0.20a

The site is built in Chinese (Simplified Chinese). To stay closer to universal standards, I want to encode it in Unicode (UTF-8) instead of GB2312.

However, my experience leads me that MySQL 4.0.20a seems to be unable to handle non-English characters in the column names, as well as the table content.

Are there some settings missing in MySQL such that I cannot use non-English characters in the database?

Besides, while I am using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004, there are 4 options (C, D, KC and KD) available under coding in unicode called "unicode normalization form". What are they and which one should I choose for maximum compatibility?

Thanks in advance.

[Madwacker]

mysql and php understand unicode natively I believe... my team and I just did a localization project on a website. We also added the line

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

at the top of our controller.php (or whatever you might use) to make sure all pages are UTF8 compliant.

hope that helps.

[rachel2004]

Originally posted by beuntzer
The environment:
MySQL 4.0.20a... I want to encode it in Unicode (UTF-8) instead of GB2312.

To use UTF-8 in MySQL, you may need to upgrade your version to a development release. This is from the MySQLmanual:

"11.5 Unicode Support
As of MySQL version 4.1, there are two new character sets for storing Unicode data:

ucs2, the UCS-2 Unicode character set.
utf8, the UTF8 encoding of the Unicode character set."

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Charset-Unicode.html