Changing character sets in text fields

[Robert Brenstein]

Ben, you hit something I have been complaining about for a few years 
now. Valentina senses that the field content was entered on Mac and 
automatically converts its encoding when it is accessed on Windows. 
In my web application, I just keep converting back and forth 
(undoubtedly wasting precious cpu cycles) ensuring that the data 
stored in db matches the platform the db runs on.

>I built a Valentina database on the Mac, which included text fields into
>which I carefully put text constructed in ISO-8859-1, because that was how
>the application that would be using the database on Windows would be
>treating it.
>
>However, the data came out wrong on Windows - it looked just like I'd expect
>ISO-8859-1 to look like on the Mac.  I then rebuilt the database (again on
>the Mac) with text in the MacRoman character set, and it came out 'right' on
>Windows.
>
>Obviously Valentina had done some conversion on the data.  It's very kind of
>Valentina, but it was unexpected, and it may not be what I want.

Yes, Ruslan tried to make it too friendly :)

>I've not been able to find any reference to this behaviour in the
>documentation.  I'd like to know:

Search the list archives. This was discussed a number of times.

>* how and where this happens.  EG, is the data stored internally in unicode,
>and transformed on both storage and retrieval according to the local
>platform?  Or is it always stored in one character set, and Valentina
>transforms on storage and retrieval on some platforms?  Or is it always
>stored exactly as inserted, with a flag to cause transformation on retrieval
>in some situations?  Or some other arrangement?

In Valentina 1.x, data is stored as ascii text. Unicode storage comes 
in 2. Valentina converts on retrieval as far as I know.

>* under what circumstances this is applied.  EG is it any 'text' field?
>what about 'varchar'?

any field that contains character data (string, varchar, text)

>* can this be configured.  Is there a setting either in Valentina, or per
>database or per table, that can be used to avoid this behaviour when it is
>not desired?

Nop. I truly hope this will change in version 2.

Robert Brenstein