At 04:39 AM 7/03/2003 -0800, Ray Holme wrote:

>Unless I missed something Dutch (like German and/or
>French) has just a few extra characters and you can
>use the extended Ascii characters to represent them.
>Using "none" will let you do this.

It's true, using NONE will let you *store* any characters, including those
higher than ascii 126. The problems come when you try to query them - you
will get transliteration errors.

Take Arno's advice. Choose the character set that maps correctly for your
input and output requirements.

>The extended
>character set however will allow things to sort
>correctly (extended Ascii values are all after "z").
>Some extended character sets will use 2-byte encoding,
>which will use double the space for all text. I
>suspect Dutch would notm but am not sure.

Don't mess with extended characters in a database. There is no standard
mapping of ascii codes to character images. The code-to-image mapping can
vary from charset to charset.

heLen