Store Unicode Chars in MySQL

Anon

hi,
I'm new at MySQL, please help me how to store Unicode (UTF 8) chars in MySQL. I assigned the fields as text and char too, but they didnt work. I run MySQL on Windows ME, I'm not sure if it works on Linux as well.

Thank you.

amarok

We have the same problem here. We want to store unicode data in MySQL, but we're not even sure whether to use UTF-8 or UCS-4!

Anyway, we came up with three methods which we are currently investigating:

o Using "iconv"
o Using "recode"
o Using PHP multibyte functions

Iconv is a library that seems to come with most Linux distros and recode is GNU software.

Perhaps one day, MySQL will have "text", "blob" and "utf8" datatypes.

Hope this helps,

Iain

Anon

You give 3 solutions for storing UNICODE Data in MySQL. Which one do you prefer:

o Using "iconv"
o Using "recode"
o Using PHP multibyte functions

Which are the pro and cons for each solution?

thanks for your support

Anon

Not sure if I'm qualified to give a proper discussion of it, but we decided to go with iconv, because we are Linux based and the PHP built-in stuff was not comprehensive enough (at the time of writing it was all still experimental, anyway).

recode is built on top of iconv (it uses the iconv libraries), but we found iconv easy enough to use, and it worked reliably, so we didn't see the point in having it all wrapped up in recode.

iconv and recode may not be available under Windows, but if you use *nix, I would pick one of them.

Feel free to email me if you'd like to discuss it some more.

Iain

Anon

I am wonder that: HOW TO -->
- using PHP multifunction ?
- mySQL could store UNICODE ?
- when I pop data out from database still in UNICODE ?