Thanks Helen, sorry about the subject: I realized what I did after I send
the message (this message board is not very compfortable).

So, please correct me if I'm wrong but I got that the best solution for me
would be to backup, create a new database setting the charset, and restore.
wich charset would be best for spanish people using W98 ? Would Win1250 do
it ? Where can I find the characters table for each character set ?

> Character set NONE will accept any byte and write it to the database as a
> character. The problem comes then, when reading it. If any character is
> not in the US Ascii character set, it will throw a transliteration error
> because it doesn't know what to do with it.

US Ascii is only the first 167 characters ? Characters I'm talking about are
á,é,í,ó,ú and ñ (including their capital versions), and they are all part of
extended ASCII. In my opinion (wich is very important, to me at least) it
should work with the extended one.
(I understand that you mean that US Ascii is the default charset in
Firebird)

Pablo.

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Message: 5
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:57:49 +1000
From: Helen Borrie <helebor@...>
Subject: Character set was RE: Digest Number 1619

Pablo,
Using a Digest Number as your message subject is a good way to get your
message ignored. When replying to a Digest entry, please paste the
original subject.

At 10:36 AM 23/07/2003 -0300, you wrote:

>First: thanks for answering.
>Yes, I didn't define the charset when I created the databsae, but isn't

this

>way suppose to make the database accept any character ?

Character set NONE will accept any byte and write it to the database as a
character. The problem comes then, when reading it. If any character is
not in the US Ascii character set, it will throw a transliteration error
because it doesn't know what to do with it.

>And if I define a specific field to a specific charset, shouldn't it work ?

It won't work if the client application stores characters from a different
charset, or if the client library doesn't tell the server what character
set the data is supposed to belong to.

>And besides the definition I gave, isn't a database engine supose to allow
>updates and deletes of any data wich where allow to be inserted ?

Not if the data are of the wrong kind. Strings in databases that support
character sets are not just strings - they are "strings with attitude". If
the charsets don't match, then the data don't match.

>How come I
>can insert a character in a VARCHAR field but I can't perform updates or
>deletes over it? What could I have done to achive such a behavior of the
>engine ?

A mismatch between the charset of the stored data and the charset of the
search or update data will always cause this.

>About the connection, I don't know how to define the charset within it. Do
>you know how can I accomplish that using Visual Fox Pro Views through a

File

>DSN ? Would "SET NAME" help ?

I can't answer that for VFP, but you should be able to get some clues by
looking up the documentation for the ODBC driver you are using, to see how
it implements either 'SET NAMES <character set name>' or the database
parameter buffer (DPB) parameter isc_dpb_lc_ctype.

heLen




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