mixing chinese and European in database

steamPunk

I need to be able to store English, French and Chinese texts in the same database table

do i need to set up the db in a particular way to avoid getting encoding problems later in the development ?

thanks

sneakyimp

I am no expert in this matter, but I would imagine that you should use Unicode as your character set when creating the database tables. You might also give careful consideration to the collation that you choose--the collation affects sort order on text fields.

steamPunk

ok - i shall check out the deal with unicode and collation

thanks

steamPunk

I've been reading all sorts of stuff about unicode character sets and I must say I'm totally confused

if I want to have English, French and Chinese characters is it better to set my db tables, connection and page encoding to ucs2_unicode_ci or UTF8_unicode_ci ... or something else ??

my db is going to be small so using a lot of bytes per character isn't a problem - I just need to be able to display all the characters in the same pages and the admin

sneakyimp

I'm not certain at all, but I think that you're talking about collations. As far as I know, these just affect things like sort order and character comparisons. You seem to be less concerned about that and more concerned about just storing english/french/chinese chars which is determined by a character set.

You may find the mysql manual on this helpful.

steamPunk

ok, i was getting confused between the two - that's cleared that one up

thanks