Changing character sets in text fields

[ron barber]

I agree with Robert on this as well. Let's keep the encoding and let us 
take care of it in our chosen development platform.

Ron



On Aug 13, 2004, at 7:28 PM, Robert Brenstein wrote:

> 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
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