If you're looking for a book-length treatment, 'Unicode Explained' is fairly readable, and the first three chapters are about character encodings in general:

http://books.google.com/books?id=PcWU2yxc8WkC&printsec=frontcover

On 12/16/2009 12:02 PM, Ken Irwin wrote:
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
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