Re: Could not Store French Accent Marks Correctly in Postgres

Am 20.08.2010 23:10, schrieb Wang, Mary Y:
> Hi,
> I'm having a problem right now. Some of our French users uploaded
> some files with file names that had French accent marks, and those
> file names were inserted into the Postgres database. When I examined
> the value of those file names, they all had some weird characters (the
> weird characters were in the same position where the accent marks were
> entered). I do not know how to handle this kind of situation. Most
> of my users are US based, but I have been told that there will be more
> international users in the future.
> So my questions are:
> (1) What is the best character encoding that would work for most
> of those languages that have accent marks?
> (2) I assume that I also need to do some kind of conversion in the
> front end (PHP) as well.
> I'm running on Linux and Postgres 8.3.8.
> Any ideas?
> Thanks in advance.
> Mary Wang
Hi,
our solution for storing uploaded files in database/filesystem with php
uses utf-8 for the filenames in the database in combination with
string-replacement for some special characters in php. These are in our
case the german "Umlaute" (ä,ö,ü,ß), because otherwise we get the
problem of strange translations of these characters (php uses utf-8,
german windows uses cp-1250), that made them unusable for
download-links. You can use the function below, just add your special
characters to the $trans-array. As another benefit this function returns
unique filenames that can be used for storing the files in a
target-directory.

<SNIP>
public static function get_unique_file_name($target_dir,
$current_file_name){
$trans = array ("ä" => "ae", "ö" => "oe", "ü" => "ue", "ß" => "ss",
"Ä" => "Ae", "Ö" => "Oe", "Ü" => "Ue");
target_file_name = strtr($current_file_name, $trans);
$i = 0;
$old_target_file_name = $target_file_name;
while(file_exists($target_dir . '/' . $target_file_name)){
$i++;
$target_file_name = $i . $old_target_file_name;
}
return $target_file_name;
}
</SNIP>

Ludwig