[thelist] Charset resources

Tony Crockford tonyc at boldfish.co.uk
Thu Oct 24 05:09:01 CDT 2002


Hi all

Why do I always get the unanswerable questions?

The client is insisting on the use of UTF-8 as the charset for delivered
pages.

I'm using a MySQL/PHP combo to create static pages.

The original data came from an Access database (it was easier, don't
ask)

The Access database has helpfully encoded 1/2 as the windows 1/2 symbol.

As long as I don't set the charset to UTF-8 this 1/2 symbol happily
appears throughout my MySQL data entry and output pages.

Of course as soon as I set the charset to UTF-8 it is replaced by
squares or ? depending on the browser.

Now I know I can replace all occurrences of the 1/2 symbol with &#189
but I'd then need to replace all the special characters with their html
equivalents and I'd get a whole new set of problems. (like which ones to
do, which ones not to do etc) and I'd need a whole more sophisticated
data entry form system too.

The question is: has anyone got any good, readable resources that would
explain why I would use one charset over another.

TIA

Tony
;o(





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