> The names of which character-sets I might be working > with here Depending on how you are getting the data out of your III system, and whether or not you've upgraded the system to Unicode, the catalog data is likely in the MARC-8 character set.
If you're looking to convert that data to UTF-8 (which I assume you would), then your best friend is a program from Index Data called yaz-marcdump, which comes with the Yaz toolkit. It runs on Linux and Windows, and can be invoked from the command line or from scripts to quickly and painlessly convert your catalog data into UTF-8. http://www.indexdata.com/yaz --Dave ================== David Walker Library Web Services Manager California State University http://xerxes.calstate.edu ________________________________________ From: Code for Libraries [code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Ken Irwin [kir...@wittenberg.edu] Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 9:02 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] character-sets for dummies? Hi all, I'm looking for a good source to help me understand character sets and how to use them. I pretty much know nothing about this - the whole world of Unicode, ASCII, octal, UTF-8, etc. is baffling to me. My immediate issue is that I think I need to integrate data from a variety of character sets into one MySQL table - I expect I need some way to convert from one to another, but I don't really even know how to tell which data are in which format. Our homegrown journal list (akin to SerialsSolutions) includes data ingested from publishers, vendors, the library catalog (III), etc. When I look at the data in emacs, some of it renders like this: Revista de Oncolog\303\255a [slashes-and-digits instead of diacritics] And other data looks more like: Revista de Música Latinoamericana [weird characters instead of diacritics] My MySQL table is currently set up with the collation set to: utf8-bin , and the titles from the second category (weird characters display in emacs) render properly when the database data is output to the a web browser. The data from the former example (\###) renders as an "I don't know what character this is" placeholder in Firefox and IE. So, can someone please point me toward any or all of the following? · A good primer for understanding all of this stuff · A method for converting all of my data to the same character set so it plays nicely in the database · The names of which character-sets I might be working with here Many thanks! Ken
