Re: Could not Store French Accent Marks Correctly in Postgres

Ludwig Kniprath <ludwig@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> · Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:21:50 +0200



    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