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Doubt about Charset Firebird

Hello Guys,

I am in a terrible doubt. What charset should I use for a field?

I am creating an table where there is a field named "name", this field will keep the
user name, but the user name can be Greeck, Hebrew, Arabic, English, French, Italian, Spanish or portuguese. I am really in doubt what charset I should use to it. Is there any that can handle with all kind of characters?

Help me on this

Thanks
Alexandre

Dan Craciun

UTF-8 should work.

HTH,
Dan

hidrau

ASKER

Hello Dan, thanks for replying me.

so, UTF-8 can keep hebrew, arabic, portuguese, english etc words?

if so, I can have only one field for all these languages that I need to work and I am very glad to know that :)

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Dan Craciun

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hidrau

ASKER

Ok,

Dan, imagine that I need to insert a name like this " alexandre " that is Portuguese in my name field. as I understood, for each character of that name I'll have 2 bites, now, if I need to insert a hebrew name / word like ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ for each character I will have 4 bites, right?

If so, then for this word ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ that has 5 character I must have a varchar field with 20.

That is an example, because I can have a word with 15 hebrew character.

Dan Craciun

Don't know the details in Firebird, but I would assume that for UTF-8 encoding, if you declare varchar(20) it will always have 80 bytes (4 bytes/char).

hidrau

ASKER

hummm,

Let me see whether I got it.

varchar(20) will keep 20 characters, it doesn't mind if it is English, Portuguese, Hebrew or Arabic. It will keep 20 characters and for each character I will have 4 bites using UTF8, am I right Dan?

Dan Craciun

Yup, that's about right, AFAIK.

hidrau

ASKER

Ok Dan.

Thanks very much for your help. You helped me a lot to understand it.

Dan Craciun

Glad I could help!