Re: character 0xe29986 of encoding "UTF8" has no equivalent in "LATIN2"

On 4 Aug 2009, at 24:57, Andreas Kalsch wrote:

>> I think the real problem is: Where do you lose the original
>> encoding the users input their data with? If you specify that
>> encoding on the connection and send it to a database that can
>> handle UTF-8 then you shouldn't be getting any conversion problems
>> in the first place.
> Nowhere - I will validate input data on the client side (PHP or
> Python) and send it to the server. Of course the only encoding I
> will use on any side is UTF8. I just wnated to use this Latin thing
> for simplification of characters.

Yes you are. How could your users input invalid characters in the
first place if that were not the case? You're not suggesting they
managed to enter characters in an encoding for which they weren't
valid on their own systems, do you?[1]

You say your client is using PHP or Python, which suggests it's a
website. That means the input goes like this: web browser -> website -
> database. All three of those steps use some encoding and you can
take them into account. That should prevent this problem altogether.

You have control over which encoding your client and the database use,
and the web browser tells what encoding it used in the POST request so
you can pass that along to the database when storing data or convert
it in your client.

[1] There exists of course a small group of people who enjoy posting
raw byte data to a web-form, but would it matter whether they'd get an
error about their encoding or not? They do not intend to enter valid
data after all ;)

Alban Hertroys

--
If you can't see the forest for the trees,
cut the trees and you'll see there is no forest.

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