In article <20030115162021.GB7111@dancygier.dhs.org>, Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com> wrote: [...]
I'm not sure how you want to handle character encoding in Koha. Does MySQL properly handle Unicode (UTF8)? If it does I think long term Koha should probably attempt to store everything in UTF8. Luckily UTF8 is backwards compatible with plain vanilla ASCII. Even if MySQL handles storing UTF8, it would take some research to make sure DBD::mysql also does.
FYI, for certain languages (esp. CJK, esp. C which is a mess), UTF8 will be semi-mandatory to make basic functionality like searching work (the alternative being constructing complicated and MySQL-specific regexp in the SQL commands). In the future, I agree that storing UTF8 in the backend is the way to go.
Otherwise, there needs to be some global config option that determines Koha's character set encoding. There is the Encode [4] module (standard with 5.8.0) which could handle translating between a variety of character encodings.
I think Koha should have a global config option -- or perhaps it should have two: one for the backend, and one for the frontend. We might, e.g., allow the backend to use UTF8 but the frontend to use ISO-8859-1. This is not as far-fetched as it seems; e.g., if a library need to provide both an English and Maori interface (or French and Chinese) for Koha, this would make perfect sense (I think). -- Ambrose Li <a.c.li@ieee.org> http://ada.dhs.org/~acli/cmcc/ http://www.cccgt.org/ DRM is theft - We are the stakeholders