At 12:56 AM 21-12-01 +0000, you wrote:

>Hello all,
>
>I need to develop and application where English, German, French and
>Spanish users will enter data in the same database.
>
>they need to be able to correctly retrieve/display and update
>regardless of the language it was entered in. (on the same record we
>potentially can have field entered in all 4 languages, with their own
>special, accented characters. (e.g. french éèçà, spanish inverted
>question mark or german long-S)
>
>I am very confused about charsets, I do not want to have to specify
>charset on every fields. I have made some tests with a a table
>created with 3 fields and 3 charset (ISO_8859, WIN1252, WIN1251 and
>WIN1252. in none of the cases I could enter any french lowercase
>accented chars, I am always geting a transliteration' error message.

Didier,
I have done a similar application, for which I used character set UNICODE_FSS on all of the text columns. (I made the global charset NONE because I have some non-data character key columns in the database).

All input for these columns is converted to unicode by intervening in the SQL formation in the application and including the _UNICODE_FSS prefix in their inputs, e.g.

INSERT INTO MYTABLE(FirstName, Surname, DateofBirth)
VALUES(_UNICODE_FSS:FIRSTNAME, _UNICODE_FSS:SURNAME, :DATEOFBIRTH);

with constants:

INSERT INTO MYTABLE(FirstName, Surname, DateofBirth)
VALUES(_UNICODE_FSS'Didier', _UNICODE_FSS'Gasser', '25.12.1975');

I must say I achieved this with great difficulty, frustration and experimentation. It was with the excellent advice of Dave Schnepper and others that I arrived at something which worked for me.

Printed output is managed with a unicode editor. It's more of a problem handling monitor output (although it's not an issue for my app, which displays HTML) - I have played about with various Windows locale settings and seem to get good on-screen results with the languages you mentioned, by swapping the locale settings.

I hope there is enough here to get you started, at least...

regards,
Helen