At 03:20 PM 29-03-00 +0100, you wrote:

>You can't store rows in different character sets, if you think about it -
>you can see why its impossible, if we could do this we would have to be able
>to determine on a row by row basis what its character set was, and since we
>hold the information as part of the tables metadata, a column by column
>capability is as granualar as we can get.
>
>If you want it on a row by row basis, you are going to need seperate tables.

Well, this much I realised when the original rock hit. I don't know much
about character sets, except that they aint compatible. I suspected I was
going to need to refer to separate tables: I just hoped there was some
loophole I could exploit. Heck, I buy lottery tickets for the purpose of
having a retirement income!

Now, I've followed Steve's advice, ditched the database and regenerated it
with UNICODE_FSS instead of NONE as the character set. I had a go at
posting a record with IB_WISQL, containing a string of Cyrillic
characters. I didn't expect it to work, and I wasn't disappointed. (Hmmm,
think about that, Helen).

So my next litttle problem is going to find some way to enter Unicode via
clients and/or scripts running on machines configured for
a(unspecified)nother charset.

Is there anyone out there who does this? And has anyone used Unicode for
data that originates from multiple charsets? Is there some smart editor
(or combination of editors) that can read, say, Russian text, and convert
it to Unicode?

Are there any gotchas with blobs, related to Unicode?

That will do for today. If I won the State Lottery tonight, I'll offer a
decorated jar of 3-byte characters as a reward for the best answer.

Cheers,
Helen

http://www.interbase2000.org
___________________________________________________
"Ask not what your free, open-source database can do for you,
but what you can do for your free, open-source database."
(J.F.K.)