[Koha-devel] Suggesting a change to the developers wiki page: Encoding and Character Sets in Koha

[Michael Hafen]

There is a section: 
   Changing Default Character Sets for MARC21 libraries using UTF-8

Looks like kados added it.

The second instruction is: 
   alter table marc_subfield_table modify subfieldvalue BINARY(255);


I've tried this and had less than satisfactory results.  In MySQL there
is a VARBINARY data type that provides better results with this
operation.

Someone with a login on the wiki please change BINARY(255) to
VARBINARY(255) on that line?  I'm to lazy to register for an
account.  :)

Also I thought some people on the list would like to know about the
VARBINARY thing.  This type has the same properties as BINARY with the
exception of the variable length instead of fixed length.  Following the
instructions as I found them I ended up with the subfieldvalue column
being null padded to 255 characters.  To correct this I had to "update
marc_subfield_table set subfieldvalue = TRIM( BOTH UNHEX('00') FROM
subfieldvalue )" to get the column back to the way I wanted.  That query
took a little while to run.  :)

Have a nice day.

-- Mike Hafen