Unicode: LC 7.0 - PHP - MySQL?

[Peter W A Wood]

Hello Tiemo

> On 30 Oct 2014, at 16:30, Tiemo Hollmann TB <toolbook at kestner.de> wrote:
> 
> Hello Peter,
> thank you for taking your time for your helpful explanations. I still have
> two issues left.
> I found in the SQL export of my db that it is UTF-8 encoded. So perhaps the
> definition of a collation "ascii_general_ci" defines a "subset" of UTF-8?

True ASCII (the first 128 characters which includes A-Z and a-z but not é, ü, etc) is a genuine subset of UTF-8. From a quick web search, it seems the _ci refers to case insensitive collation so that "A" and "a" are treated the same.

> As far as I understand it now, I should pass all LC strings with
> uniEncode(string,UTF8) to the PHP because of the UTF-8 of MySQL. Probably I
> will fiddle around with uniEncode/uniDecode at the interface to the PHPs and
> see with which encode parameter the correct string gets into the MySQL db. 
> 
> On the other side I am importing data from a Valentina-DB. Where I have to
> set the Encoding to Macintosh / Latin, depending on the platform. Does this
> platform related conversion gets obsolete with LC 7 UniCode, or is this
> still valid, because of data coming from outside, though Valentina probably
> also is Unicode.

From their website, it seems that Valentina uses the same 'C library' as LiveCode (LibICU) and stores text UTF-16 encoded. In theory, you shouldn't need to convert text passing between the two but it may be different in practice.

Hope this helps.

Peter