Didier Gasser-Morlay wrote:

> Lester,
>
> Didier Gasser-Morlay wrote:
> > In PHP I understand there is a specific extension (mbstring) whichs
> > deals with multi byte issues.
>
> I've kept clear of that.
>
> [Didier] would you care to elaborate on why ? It seems/seemed to be a
> good solution.

It may not be available on a hosts site.
You have to port any database stuff to mb_* format before you can use it, and
then you may be incompatible with library updates.
It HAS to use two bytes to represent the ISO8859_* character sets, as only the
first 127 characters are allowed in a single byte. ( May be wrong on that, but
having to re-write ADOdb was not an option so I stuck with single byte returns
for now )

> > as I understand it, the Ukrainian language (Cyrillic) does not really
> > requires multi byte, (but then again I am just brushing the issue).
>
> Which is why I think you will not actually need the full UTF-8 solution,
> just a single byte collation that also includes cyrillic characters.
>
> [Didier]
> As I am really at the current limits of my knowledge/understanding which
> collation would do the trick, as I need English and Cyrillic in the same
> fields if I do not want to rewrite the whole application

In FB2 - KOI8U Ukrainian character set and dictionary collation but
WIN1251 or ISO8859_5 both have latin and cyrillic characters without going to
multi byte collations.
As has been said, you can have multiple character sets available in Firebird,
which may be obsolete with UTF8, but is very useful at times when you want to
switch sort orders.

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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