Hi, Dave, Glad to be of help. I hope you don't mind if I CC this rambling response to the list. Concerning
> The documentation is not that useful (in terms of telling me just what > languages are supported) but going by the directories it seems all bar > Chinese are supported. I haven't actually tested my hypothesis, but if you check the file mysql/share/charsets/index, you should note entries for big5, gbk, and gb2312. Google at "big5 character", etc., and you should find some useful information about Chinese character sets, including their abbreviations. (If you get a chance to pick up Ken Lunde's CJKV book, which is often mentioned in this connection, it is very helpful for working with traditional encodings.) So, I think the Chinese character sets are supported. You will be wondering why there are no tables for these in mysql/share/charsets. You will notice that all the tables here are relatively small, nowhere near large enough to record what is necessary for handling multi-byte character sets. Careful reading of the manual somewhere around section 4.6 leads me to conclude the following: MySQL appears to use fast tables for small character sets, but fall back to the slower range tests for large character sets. (I can well imagine why. Building those tables by hand is out of the question. Building them mechanically requires building the range tests first, and carefully organized range tests can approach the speed of tables. A flat tables are huge enough one probably would not want to load them in systems with less than 128M of RAM. Stepped tables may require assembly language to be faster than range tests in most cases.) You will also be wondering why there are no Chinese directories in mysql/share. I would guess it is because no one has bothered to build an error message file yet. Care to volunteer? Anyway, the language directories under mysql/share are just error message files, so if you are willing to read English error messages you should be able to work with Chinese. My workstation at present is MSW2k, so I can't use the euc-JIS Japanese error messages, and I seem to be getting along okay. Joel Rees Alps Giken Kansai Systems Develoment Suita, Osaka --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
