Mark Rotteveel schrieb am 05.01.2012 um 21:21 (+0100):

> On Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:10:15 +0400, Vander Clock Stephane
> <svanderclock@...> wrote:

> > now let thing i target such country (portugal, spain, france,
> > italian, etc..) what kind of charset will best fit my database ?
> > of course UTF8 ! but is it neccessary that when i declare a
> > varchar(255) for my varchar column firebird handle in background a
> > varchar(1250) ?? absolutely not as in these language most of the
> > char need only one byte to be encoded in UTF8
>
> If you target Portugal, Spain, France and Italy, then ISO-8859-1
> should be enough for your needs.

No, it's not; Œ and œ are missing from ISO-8859-1 (Latin1). Guess the
French delegation to the ISO botched up badly on that one … :) They were
more alert later when ISO-8859-15 (Latin9) was devised, which includes
not only the sigil of an ill-conceived currency (€) but also the Œ and
œ. So that's what you should be using, I think, for your selection of
Western European countries.

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin9.html

--
Michael Ludwig