Hi all,
I'm working for a client at the moment who is basically translating their site into every conceivable language.
The entire site is created as a set of static htm pages on a nightly basis from a MySQL database. All the text in the site is pulled from a database of site translations.
The client aproached me today wondering if adding a japanese site translation to the database would have any adverse effects on the database inserts. Now i'm aware of problems when inserting dodgy restricted characters into mysql but i have no clue about japanese, having never been required to do this before, so i looked at a few articles on the net. They don't really fill me with confidence!
From what i can gather there are 3 separate characters sets required for total japanese conversion (and i guess this company will eventually require chinese, russian, etc too.) I also understand that the default install options for mysql on a linux box will probably allow the use of non-latin character sets anyway.
However the bit that confuses me is what, if anything, needs to be done to my php installation. I've read in one place that about 20 lines have to be added to the php.ini file and it wasn't very helpful or conclusive, but there seems to be so little documentation on the use of non-latin sets in php and mysql that i can only assume that both handle japanese perfectly by default! why else would there be so little documentation!?
Can someone please cleary and methodically explain what i need to do to allow my clients existing database and php installation to cope with them adding japanese characters to it using my php scripts.
Thanks in advance.
