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Thursday 12 August 2004 8:14:06 am
utf-8 is OK allthought it would be faster if it was stored using the current internal charset (removes conversion need).
We already do this for the XML datatype but it hasn't been implemented for the other datatypes yet.
Also <i>unicode</i> is the character set but is not an encoding so cannot be used for storage, however unicode has several encodings defined.
utf-8: The most common in stored media, uses 1 to 6 bytes for storage, ie. it is variable and works seamlessly with existing 8bit string code. However it is a bit slow due to the variable size. usc2: Stores using double-byte, much faster since lookup is constant and quite often used internally in programs. Unfortenately doing this in PHP using PHP code only could quite easily be troublesome
usc4: Similar to usc2 but uses four bytes (since the initial 2 bytes were not enough for all languages in the world, something like 21 bit is needed I believe).
there are also other encodings (like the non-standard utf-7.5) but hardly used. So storing utf-8 in 8bit only databases is OK as long as you don't try to do text operations on them in the database.
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Amos
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