How string are stored

[Ruslan Zasukhin]

on 8/8/03 12:54, Robert Brenstein at rjb at rz.uni-potsdam.de wrote:

>>>  Will version 2 support encoding properly? In other words, when will I
>>>  be finally able to run on a Mac and Valentina will properly handle
>>>  fields with windows (iso) encoding?
>> 
>> Now it cannot do this ?
> 
> Nop.
> 
>> We can read one MAC db files from Windows that contains strings in the
>> Windows encoding.
> 
> Try to input Windows-encoded German text on a Mac and look at it on
> Windows. Valentina will convert it, although it is wrong in this
> case. Your assuming that input encoding is the same as operating
> system is very simplistic and limiting.
> 
>> OR what you mean?
> 
> I am bringing back what we discussed on and off over past 2 or 3
> years. I want to be able to, for example, input Windows text on a Mac
> and have it correctly recognized there.

I see what you mean.
It seems I know that only few apps can do this:
    1) ICQ
    2) IE browser
    3) Safary

Do you know any other non-Internet app, which can do what you ask for?


> An practical scenerio that I brought in the past:
> I have a database that handles lots of text. Users are entering, editing, and
> viewing it through web interface. The server is Mac but the web interface
> passes me iso-encoded text. As it is, I need to convert it to Mac encoding
> before storing and then recode it before sending back to web. If I don't do
> that, sorting and searching do not work correctly (for non-ascii texts).
> 
> If I could set encoding=iso-8859-1 (western or latin1) and language=german and
> valentina would do searching and sorting accordingly, I could skip the
> decoding/recoding steps. a) For server operation every cpu cycle counts
> although decoding/recoding do not steal too much they are still waste of time.
> b) Current approach makes it difficult to handle web pages in non-western
> encodings.
> 
> As we discussed in the past, having both encoding and language parameters for
> fields is a way to support proper text handling in various languages. Default
> could be encoding=auto (the current, platform-specific) but one could have
> encoding=utf8 or utf16 or iso-8859-2 (central-european aka latin2) or
> iso-8859-5 (cyrrilic) or chinese...
> 
> With your plugin technology in V2, one could self add sort/search functions
> for specific languages and encodings (if you offer to support that as
> plugins).

I see idea.

I just do not know what to answer...

1) may be we need such encoding parameter -- as global property of Database?
But not of each Field?

2) the main question that I have is:
     all these encodings, unicode, UTF8, UTF16 and built into OS SYSTEM
(MAC, WIN, LIN)...if not this is not right.



-- 
Best regards,
Ruslan Zasukhin      [ I feel the need...the need for speed ]
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e-mail: ruslan at paradigmasoft.com
web: http://www.paradigmasoft.com

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