Hi, http://public.m-plify.net/mysql/MySQL_Charset_Handling.pdf http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-connection.html May be these links can de-mistfy some of your doubts. if you see the some of the postings on this page, then you might be able to even resolve this issue and make the DB behave in a standard way. Regards, Satya www.osslabs.biz On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 10:21 PM, ZHANG, YIN <yzhang4@kent.edu> wrote:

Hello All,

We are using Koha 3.0 in Ubuntu 8 for a collection with many items in foreign languages. It is our understanding that Koha 3.0 should be able to handle Unicode. However, we have problems to insert any some special characters in non-English.

Basically, the database will chop anything followed a special character. If the string we try to insert is "Den økonomiske", only "Den " gets in. If a special character starts a string, it ends up with an empty string in the database.

Here is our Koha database configuration as created:

+--------------------------+----------------------------+

| Variable_name | Value |

+--------------------------+----------------------------+

| character_set_client | utf8 |

| character_set_connection | utf8 |

| character_set_database | utf8 |

| character_set_filesystem | binary |

| character_set_results | utf8 |

| character_set_server | utf8 |

| character_set_system | utf8 |

| character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |

+--------------------------+----------------------------+

There is a twist that we can't understand. When we temporally set the font to latin1 (e.g., set names latin1), the database can take the special characters without problem:

+--------------------------+----------------------------+

| Variable_name | Value |

+--------------------------+----------------------------+

| character_set_client | latin1 |

| character_set_connection | latin1 |

| character_set_database | utf8 |

| character_set_filesystem | binary |

| character_set_results | latin1 |

| character_set_server | utf8 |

| character_set_system | utf8 |

| character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |

+--------------------------+----------------------------+

Any idea what is going on? Thanks so much for your help in advance!

Yin

*Yin Zhang*

*School of Library and Information Science Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242 email: yzhang4@kent.edu***

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