character encoding question

[jez]

Hi there,

I have a stock install of mysql 3.23 which (by default) is using the Latin1 character set.

I want to ensure that it will support accented characters like in french words and french names.

I think from reading the docs, that i need to use utf8 but i am not sure how to go about that, it looks like this wasnt added until mysql 4.
Is it as simple as defining it when you create the database with a sql command?

Any pointers greatly appreciated, so far i have always only worked with english characters.


Thanks

Jez

 

[likelylad]

Latin 1 or ISO 8859-1 actually supports most western European characters. If you are using French and German then there won't be any issues. I am assuming that the characters past 128 are inputted using the alt representation.

If you want to use utf8, then you need to get MySQL version 4, as this version supports unicode.