[Koha] Latin1 vs. Unicode (UTF-8)

[Zeno Tajoli]

Dear Gary,

>Opinions please. MARC records we plan to load into our Koha database 
>are encoded in the MARC-8 format. This document tells us to use 
>UTF-8 encoded records.
>
><http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?do=show&id=encodingscratchpad>http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?do=show&id=encodingscratchpad 
>(nice work, Josh, but we have test loaded some records in MARC-8 
>that seem to work fine, but we respect your knowledge, so now we are 
>questioning ourselves as we move closer to a production environment)
>
>We have read many items on this issue. Any additional opinions on 
>what is the correct thing to do will be appreciated. It is my 
>intention to leave this question open-ended in hopes of getting 
>several points of view from the Koha community. Thanks.

MARC-8 is not avaible as option to encode data into Koha db.
In fact koha db engine is MySQL that dosen't understand really MARC-8.
But it appears working because often (in the latin word) MARC-8 code 
is the same of UTF-8.

Tecnicaly speaking you can setup Koha to use Latin1 encoding (ISO 8859-1).
But I don't suggest you this option.

My suggestion is to translate your data from MARC-8 to UTF-8.
But remeber to do a correct setup [read all 
http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?do=show&id=encodingscratchpad]

Cheers
Zeno Tajoli


Zeno Tajoli
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