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0 pointspjscott13y ago0 comments

How many tools have 3-byte limits on UTF-8? The only one I can think of right now is MySQL. (The workaround is to specify the utf8mb4 character set. This is MySQL's cryptic internal name for "actually doing UTF-8 correctly.")

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jrabone13y ago

MySQL is one of the worst offenders for broken Unicode and collation problems arising therein. Neither it nor JavaScript deserve consideration for problems that need robust Unicode handling.

mikeash13y ago

I actually switched my (low traffic, low performance needs) blog comments database from MySQL to SQLite purely because I could not make MySQL and Unicode get along. All I needed was for it to accept and then regurgitate UTF-8 and it couldn't even handle that. I'm sure it can be done, but none of the incantations I tried made it work, and it was ultimately easier for me to switch databases.

pjscottOP13y ago

As an ugly last resort, you could store Unicode as UTF-8 in BLOB fields. MySQL is pretty good about storing binary data. (I dread the day that I'll have to do something more advanced with Unicode in MySQL than just storing it.)

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