Helen,

Sorry I did not answered earlier, I was away for a couple of days
(pre-xmas holidays :-)). Anyway, the Unicode FSS seems to be a quite
laborious way. I also forgot to mention that my app must be able to
run on some other DB engines (namely Sybase & Oracle).
If I have to prefix all fields with '_UNICODE_FSS:' then the new
issue is that I will have to maintain a completely separate set of
Sql code for firebird (aaarrrgh).

I did some more experiment, and notices that if I set the default
charset to be WIN1252, it seems that at least the basic accented
western european characters are indeed recognised, with no display
issues (at least none obvious I could find) in Delphi.

My front end is Windows only, so , am I missing something?

The root of my previous problems came from the fact that I've been
using several different DBA tools for interbase (in view of testing &
chosing the right one for me), but it seems that all those products
have a completely different defualt understanding/behaviour as far as
default charset are concerned. so I ended up with a dreadful mixture
of fields and charsets, without realizing.

Another question, I ghave tried to find a description (comprehensive)
of collation orders, but all I could come up with was collation order
names (or codes) with are supposedly known to a lot of people (but
me ?) I'd love to see a table showing how a particulmar collation
sequence works and/or how easy it could be to build my own.

Thanks again for your time,

Have a Happy New year

Didier

--- In ib-support@y..., Helen Borrie <helebor@d...> wrote:
> 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