[rt-devel] Re: accent problem in tickets submission by mail

[Louis-David Mitterrand]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 11:40:53AM +0100, THAUVIN Blaise (Dir. Informatique) wrote:
> As you've seen in your database, the French accented caracters are not
> stored "as is" in the database. Latin1 extensions are not part of standard

Our main SQL_ASCII database is full of accented characters from the
latin1 subset, whithout any problems. AFAIK they fit into the 1 byte
address space (255 chars). What does unicode bring to the table if we
don't plan to expand beyond western european languages? (sorry for the
off-topic question)

> ASCII and are all 2 bytes caracters in unicode. In term of sorting for
> example, it may be faster with your setting, but the resulting order will be
> rather strange when accented caracters come on the way. Also, when using
> database functions for counting caracters in a string, you'll get different
> results (with unicode, number of caracters (bytes) in a string is between
> one time and twice the number of symbols). This is a problem with setting
> the size for each field (by the way, is that OK in RT? Or can we overrun
> database fields by filling with double-byte only caracters an input field in
> RT's GUI?).
> 
> I can't explain why you got the spurius space, but it seems to me it is
> always better to use the right encoding in the database when you can.

Agreed. I just want to make sure RT requires UNICODE in its Postgres
database to properly operate and better understand the issues. It's
possible to maintain different encodings in each database on a single
Postgres installation, so it's not a problem for me to convert.

In any case thanks for your insight, cheers,

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