Hi all,
[ snipped ]
I'm interested in knowing of any problems I should be looking out for while designing this - what happens to Japanese characters for example when stored in a MySQL text field? Any issues re: displaying them again once extracted? Or on validating foreign data input on web forms?
We develop a few multi-language websites here, but mostly dealing with two languages; our most complex site is in three languages. I can provide the following tips:
1. MySQL's default character set is latin1 -- you need to watch out for this when storing information because it will get garbled. Character sets and collations vary greatly depending on what version of MySQL you are using. I would suggest going over the character set section in the manual [ http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/charset-server.html ] if you haven't already. 4.1 has most of the features you would need.
2. Text searching can be a bit of a pain. We were using a system that defaults to utf-8; and stored the information in MySQL. Our users were logging in from Windows, and their character set was windows-1256 -- so searches were turning up blank, till we converted the system to windows-1256. Don't ask me how/why, because I'm really not that good with all this character set stuff :) If you figure this out, please let me know. I've found that matching the character set of HTML to what is expected from your users is the best compromise when coming to display & searching.
3. I'm not sure how you would go and validate foreign data input; as I have never had to do such myself (all our input was in English on the public side, and on the backend, it was manually verified). Best of luck on this one.
Cheers, Burhan
-- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
