Rebecca Smith,
> Hi there
>
> What is the best character set to use in MySQL - that can be used
> interoperably between PHP, Access, csv files, etc. and display ALL
> characters as they are supposed to?
The short answer to your question would probably be UTF8. It is
probably the "best" and most inter-operable between disparate systems
but, and I can hear everyone thinking this, it cannot display ALL
characters so it fails there. Do you really mean every conceivable
character ever?
The long answer is that "everything" absolutely everything in the
entire platform and development/data handling process must be aware that
it should be using the correct character set and be capable of
supporting it which is far trickier than it sounds at first and is what
usually causes people grief. Only UCS-2 will display everything and is
supported by MySQL, although you won't be able to do full text searches
with it because glyph based languages don't work at all the way the
Latin or Crylic alphabets do. The reason I said UTF8 is that I'd guess
you may find problems with some other components of your setup, I know
Windows uses UTF16/UCS-2 internally so Access "might" be okay. Having
said that Access is a complete puzzlement to me sometimes. PHP will need
the mbstrings extension to handle multi-byte character encodings, er,
CSV files are CSV files really.
So long as you don't need full text searching and your sure the
other components of your solution are compatible use UCS-2, otherwise
UTF8 is your next best bet and you'll loose a few pretty unusual characters.
Regards,
Phil
