[Koha-devel] Koha backend's character encoding (was: Re: MARC character encoding)

[address@hidden via news-to-mail gateway]

In article <address@hidden>,
Ed Summers <address@hidden> wrote: [...]

>I'm not sure how you want to handle character encoding in
>Koha. Does MySQL properly handle Unicode (UTF8)? If it does
>I think long term Koha should probably attempt to store
>everything in UTF8. Luckily UTF8 is backwards compatible with
>plain vanilla ASCII. Even if MySQL handles storing UTF8, it
>would take some research to make sure DBD::mysql also does.

FYI, for certain languages (esp. CJK, esp. C which is a mess),
UTF8 will be semi-mandatory to make basic functionality like
searching work (the alternative being constructing complicated
and MySQL-specific regexp in the SQL commands). In the future, I
agree that storing UTF8 in the backend is the way to go.

>Otherwise, there needs to be some global config option that
>determines Koha's character set encoding. There is the Encode
>[4] module (standard with 5.8.0) which could handle translating
>between a variety of character encodings.

I think Koha should have a global config option -- or perhaps it
should have two: one for the backend, and one for the frontend.
We might, e.g., allow the backend to use UTF8 but the frontend
to use ISO-8859-1. This is not as far-fetched as it seems; e.g.,
if a library need to provide both an English and Maori interface
(or French and Chinese) for Koha, this would make perfect sense
(I think).


-- 
Ambrose Li  <address@hidden>
http://ada.dhs.org/~acli/cmcc/  http://www.cccgt.org/

DRM is theft - We are the stakeholders