[Koha] Searching UTF-8 entries [Koha 3.01.00.002]

[Krishnan Mani]

Hi HS,

Yes, you are definitely on your way now from your last few posts.

What you see as the output from your mysql client are the Defaults for character_set_client, etc. However, a MySQL client can "interactively negotiate" the choice of encoding with MySQL server. That's may be the reason why some of your text may still display right, but you need to ensure you are indeed using language data that needs UTF-8 (any 'double-byte' characters are a good bet, like Chinese pictograms).

My guess is that some of the text that is in a different language may not need UTF-8 to display correctly if Latin1 encoding is adequate to represent it. This should certainly be the case with some European languages (though i haven't verified this as i write)

i hope that you are now following one of the good install guides. Remember that i only pasted an EXCERPT from them.

I haven't tried switching the encoding on an *existing* Koha (or any other) database. My guess is that it may not be an "automatic" operation, where you expect everything to work just as before without doing anything with the data. i have never even "migrated" from one Koha database or version to another, so i am out of my depth here.

Since it looks like you didn't catalog a whole lot, the best bet may be to start with a fresh Koha database. Perhaps you may be able to export your holdings and import them afresh.

An important disclaimer i forgot to add to my earlier post: 
Your choice of browser or e-mail client and configuration may even prevent you from correctly viewing the Hindi text i pasted into the e-mail. The correct approach is to have an image of the text next to the text itself and see how they display in your browser or client.

There are some pages on Wikipedia that will do this for you and help you check if your browser is correctly setup (i don't recall which ones at the moment)

Thanks and regards,



krishnan mani

Pune, India

--- On Tue, 7/10/08, H.S. <hs.samix at gmail.com> wrote:
From: H.S. <hs.samix at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Koha] Searching UTF-8 entries [Koha 3.01.00.002]
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Date: Tuesday, 7 October, 2008, 9:33 AM

H. S. wrote:
> 
> In mysql that i have, I get this:
> 
> mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character\_set\_%';
> +--------------------------+--------+
> | Variable_name            | Value  |
> +--------------------------+--------+
> | character_set_client     | latin1 |
> | character_set_connection | latin1 |
> | character_set_database   | latin1 |
> | character_set_filesystem | binary |
> | character_set_results    | latin1 |
> | character_set_server     | latin1 |
> | character_set_system     | utf8   |
> +--------------------------+--------+
> 7 rows in set (0.00 sec)
> 
> 
> So even though my system is utf8, mysql databases are being created in
> latin1. Is my understanding correct?


Just found out that my koha database is in latin1 encoding:
mysql> SHOW CREATE DATABASE koha;
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Database | Create Database
     |
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| koha     | CREATE DATABASE `koha` /*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET
latin1 */ |
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql>


Now the next big thing is to convert the database to utf8. Now, I have
some text in a different language (for example the name of the library).
It is displayed properly in the browser. Isn't that text saved in one of
the tables? And what will happen to that if I covert all the tables to
utf8 now?

Thanks.





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