> > It'd be even nicer if you could make a table that has, say, one column
> > utf8 (or utf32 even), one column euc-jp and one column shift-jis, so
> > that you could cache format conversions.
>
> This might be a nice thing to show off but I'm not sure about the
> practical use. There's Unicode that you can use if you want to mix and
> match on the server, and the ability to convert the character set between
> client and server so the right thing shows up on everyone's screen.
Storing everything as Unicode is not a good idea, actually. First,
Unicode tends to consume more storage space than other character
sets. For example, UTF-8, one of the most commonly used encoding for
Unicode consumes 3 bytes for Japanese characters, while SJIS only
consumes 2 bytes. Second, a round trip converison between Unicode and
other character sets is not always possible. Third, sorting
issue. There is no convenient way to sort Unicode correctly.
--
Tatsuo Ishii