International Character Support
 

I'm developing a back-end for a simple product but have been asked to be forward thinking about supporting international character storage.

I'm not too familiar with anything outside of simple character encoding issues so I was hoping someone could lend some insight as per what would be my best choice for storing data in MySQL.

I'm leaning towards utf8_bin.

I really appreciate any comments.

jw

phpBB3 uses utf8_bin and that works great for them. They've had to do lots to get UTF-8 working properly in PHP though.

I've had no problems with UTF-8 either when doing this. However, Bluesaga is probably the best man to ask about this.

utf8_general_ci is what you want to use, utf8_bin is binary......

However there is PHP specific issues with utf-8, being erradicated in PHP 6 but definitely there is some. Also if you are scraping information, you do need to check content type and change it.

However if you just want functions to work with php, check the mbstring extension and if you are using preg functions you need to make them Unicode compatible.

The 2 key functions that you'll probably wish to look at from the mbstring module are the following:

• mb_detect_encoding
• mb_convert_encoding

These will get you off to a good start.