charset

Hi!

What db charset you suggest for best compatibility?

There is one that is better then others? or used by default?

Thanks!


ps. one more thing. in phpmyadmin the collation is utf8_general_ci while in the manager system info the charet shown is latin1
Why?
and what are the differences from collation and charset

Collation needs to match charset. They should both be utf-8. There are several different types of utf-8 collations, which determine how things are ordered and compared for different languages.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-unicode-sets.html

so if i create a db from my isp panel, and i don’t know if i can change the charset set by default

should i set the same collation during revo setup?


thanks

phpMyAdmin will let you change the table charset

Depending on your permission level, you can also set a default for all databases.

Beware of changing the charset for an existing table, though. If there is already data in the table, that data itself will be in the wrong charset.

There is always the possibility of doing a table copy.

You will probably have to expert the table and data, edit the sql to reflect the new COLLATE, delete or rename old table, and finally import the edited sql.

Another dirty trick you may be able to use is something like:

Copy only the table
Set the proper COLLATE
and then execute something like:



I suspect that should work. I have never had to change a COLLATE from anything more than the ISO "english" to UTF-8 "english" (actual charsets not provided)

Quote from: wshawn at Mar 11, 2010, 09:00 AM

There is always the possibility of doing a table copy.

You will probably have to expert the table and data, edit the sql to reflect the new COLLATE, delete or rename old table, and finally import the edited sql.

Depending on what’s in the table, that won’t work because it doesn’t convert the actual *data* in the table, which is still in the old format. There are tools to do that, but it’s a major hassle and I haven’t had much luck with it.

I think it depends on the data. if the data has already been "trashed" then converting it will not work.

Its one of those things my Senior Drill Sargent taught us:

Prior Planning Prevents Piss-poor Performance.

Now if the programming needs of our clients would only allow us to prior plan their future needs,

There is always another option:

Was a back up made of the data before it got trashed?

Anyway. There are options and as Bob correctly stated -- none of them are easy or nice or even guaranteed.