Changing character sets in text fields

[Ruslan Zasukhin]

On 8/13/04 1:15 PM, "Ben Rubinstein" <benr_mc at cogapp.com> wrote:

Hi Ben,

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

* Valentina 1.x do not store data in unicode.
    Valentina 2.0 can do this.

* yes, Valentina do convesion of strings self.
    Works only for Western encodings (about 14 languages).
    for example it will not work for Cyrillic.
    Behavior is like in Macromedia Director.

* Valentina always keep db in platforms native format.
    if you move db to other platform, then Valentina on the fly convert
strings and numbers.

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

Strings, VarChar and 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?

No, this is not controlled in Valentina 1.x

Again, in Valentina 2.0 we will have much more ways to control this.
BTW, now I got idea:
We will make 3 parameters for this

    db.StorageEncoding
    db.InputEncoding
    db.OutputEncoding

Will be supported 170 encodings of the world.


-- 
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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