Tim Bunce wrote:
> High bit doesn't always mean uft8 - may be latin1 etc etc.

I realise this.  Also, this utf8 flag toggling should only occur when the
field is a text field and not any other kind of datatype.  I'm assuming
that large objects would not be affected by this, but can you store binary
data in a column? (Alas, I know very little about what my database can do
:-(  )

> Is it not possible to tell (from the database api) when data is utf8? I
> don't know PostgreSQL, but from the psql -l output above it seems that
> the charset is a per-database issue. So maybe the database
> charset needs to be queried and recorded at connect() time.

That's one way to do it, and could be useful.  However, it would also be
useful if you could explicitly ask the dbh to put the driver into utf8
mode.  The reason for this is that we have a number of postgresql
databases which are set up as SQL_ASCII, even though we've stored UTF8 in
them.  This has worked ok under previous perl's because they just tended
to output the bytes that they were given.

> (I think this is also going to be a big issue in MySQL 4.1, which
> can have different charsets in different fields of the same table...)

Eeek.  I assumed that charset would only be a per database thing after
looking at postgres...

-Dom

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