Oops, sorry. I accidentally hit the "enter" key in the previous post o.O

Anyway. It's a question that has occupied me for some time now, but  
never got around to ask somebody, so here goes:

Unicode seems like a cure-all solution for dealing with special  
characters. I agree that it helps a lot. But since it appeared, I have  
been faced with several problems where it was very hard to determine  
the encoding of a string (as I never saved/created them in the first  
place). And there are many sources of error. What is the best way to  
find out the encoding of a string.

Let's say you write a web application. Basically the string has to  
pass through the following layers:

Database -> Scripting language (python) -> web-server -> browser

If you end up with unintelligible strings, what approach would you  
suggest to examine it.

The main problem lies in actually *viewing* the string in question.  
Example: If you see garbled characters in - let's say - phpMyAdmin.  
Then the error could be on any of the mentioned levels (except by  
replacing python with php of course). It could even mean that the  
character is simply saved wrong. So the display is correct, but the  
data in the database is messed up.

On the other hand, vieving the string in your console (on linux) it  
might even get messed up with because of that.

I am aware that this has nothing to do /directly/ with SQLObject. Even  
so, it is a problem that some people might be faced when dealing with  
other encodings than their system's default.

As appetiser, the way I usually end up examining a string, is looking  
at it's hex representation and then looking up encoding  
specifications/charts to see if the hex-code matches the  
specification. If it does, I found the encoding. But that's a tedious  
process.

Cheers,

Mich


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security?
Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier
Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642
_______________________________________________
sqlobject-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sqlobject-discuss

Reply via email to