charset on c4lj db

[Ed Summers]

Hi all,

I have some Japanese characters in an article I'm editing and noticed
that the UTF-8 I paste into the form gets converted to question marks
after I post it. I did a little bit of poking around and believe this
is the result of the c4lj database having a default character set of
latin1.

mysql> show create database c4lj;
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Database | Create Database |
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| c4lj | CREATE DATABASE `c4lj` /*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 */ |
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

I just thought I'd mention it in case it hasn't come up before.

//Ed

[Tom Keays]

Hi Ed,

Not knowing much about character sets, is your recommendation that we
change the setting in MySQL to UTF-8? Will that have any consequences
for our existing articles that were created with the latin1 setting?

I would want to back up the Wordpress database before making any
change -- so probably not until Saturday if we decide to do this.

Tom

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[Ed Summers]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Tom Keays <tomk...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I would want to back up the Wordpress database before making any
> change -- so probably not until Saturday if we decide to do this.

I'm not actually recommending anything. charset issues can be thorny.
Just pointing out something you all may have known already.

//Ed

[Tod Olson]

In an ideal world I'd like the database to be in unicode. It would certainly make it easier to get non-Roman characters in. But I'm not certain how much effort it is worth, especially if the conversion in non-trivial.

-Tod

[Tom Keays]

OK. I don't want to make any changes while we're in article editing
mode (the site is always active, since we allow comments, but they are
of less concern than articles, at least regarding formatting). A few
weeks after we publish, I'll see if we can upgrade to unicode. Say,
mid-November...

[Tod Olson]

Oh, certainly. And I was quite serious wondering how much effort a conversion is actually worth.

-Tod

[Ed Summers]

If you want to have content that isn't restricted to LATIN-1 it's worth it.