[PHP-I18N] Getting...oriented.

[a . h . s . boy]

Well, I've mostly lived through the experience of internationalizing a very large PHP application (using gettext()) to support the majority of Western languages. I'm using UTF-8 as the default encoding for the site (and form input), though MySQL still has Latin1 as its default character set (which doesn't seem to pose any problems). But just when I thought that might be sufficient, of course someone comes along and wants to use the system in English and...Japanese.

At this point, I'm forced to venture beyond my Occidentocentric ways into the mysterious world of multi-byte strings, rebuilt PHP configurations, and "function overloading". As if I didn't have enough to do already.

I've poked around the PHP manual with an eye towards the mb_ functions, but even the manual isn't geared towards a virgin like me. Frankly, all this stuff about http_input, http_output, internal_encoding and convert_encoding is making my head hurt.

Can someone give me some introductory pointers to get my bearings? Specifically, I'm looking to find out what sort of modifications my existing application will require, and where and when they are applied. The rough outline of the current system is basic:

-- Pages have a http header with a charset of "UTF-8".

-- Some pages have a form for users to upload text _and_ graphics (enctype="multipart/form-data").

-- Users submit information which is then stored in MySQL (which is set to Latin1)

-- Display pages often show multiple text entries in whatever language they were entered using, so multiple languages are displayed on the same page (which has been fine with, for example, Greek and English and Turkish)

So where does internal_encoding come into play? What about http_input? And http_output? Or encoding_translation? Or mb_convert_encoding?

Will I need to increase the field size of MySQL fields to accomodate the extra bytes used in mb strings? Do I need to change MySQL's default encoding? What if that MySQL server is also used by others who aren't using Japaense?

*sigh* I'm lost.

Cheers,
spud.

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a.h.s. boy
spud(at)nothingness.org "as yes is to if,love is to yes"
http://www.nothingness.org/
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