Re: Character encoding in database dumps

On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, M. Bastin wrote:

> >Does anyone have any idea
> >how I can do a database dump that keeps the character encoding intact?

[ Sorry, idle mind. :-) ]

Reading a bunch of these messages over the last while, it appears
that the database will only support a single character encoding
internally/natively. Maybe I am wrong, and maybe this will change
in the future.

But, if you need to interact in multiple character sets now, this
seems to be something which you are now doing with a front-end of
some kind. Perhaps the thing to do, is to add a field to your
tables (or make them into 2 column arrays?) involving character
data, where this new field (or 0'th array element?) stores the
character set used when the data was originally input. If a
front-end makes a query involving character data, it gets back the
character set involved and the character data. Then the front-end
has to deal with translating from one character set to another.

Just my $0.02 (CDN)
Gord