Correct charset/locale settings?

[Joonas Hämäläinen]

Hips,

I was asking similar question in horde mailing list yesterday, but was
directed to search i18n list. I didn't find answers via search, so I'll
rephrase my question a bit and ask again. :)

I have multinational horde installation, running old horde version. I am
  in need to update it into current version, and of course keep old data
for users.

So, very hard bottom question is what character settings I should use in
horde? It seems to default in utf8, but if I take old db and upgrade it
for new version, there are entries which doesn't look correct.

Old system has latin1_swedish_ci collation. Server itself has
en_US.UTF-8 locale. That old horde doesn't have such charset setting.

So should I just take old data, keep it latin1, set horde charset to
latin1 and be happy that things work again? Is there something what
might break?

Or is it better to get database in utf8, and then have horde charset
also in utf8?

If I do this utf8 conversion, some parts seems to be right, but then
there are places where it is wrong. If I change horde charset into
latin1, they appear correct. I'm a bit confused about this behaviour.

What worries me most is that it is multinational system, and there are
plenty of different users. Russians, Finnish, europeans, some Asians,
they all use it daily, both in English and in their native language,
using their native characters. What kind of settings I need to use to
make sure they all have their data working best way?

This is quite long list of questions, and I have tried searching for
solution quite a while. If reply to me is search more, please provide me
some keywords to use. I might have tried with wrong search terms.
Hardest part is always ask right questions ;) Also, if there is some
documentation describing relations of different charsets/locales in
different components of system (system locale, mysql collation, horde
setting, browser input, etc), I would like to hear of such.

-Joonas Hämäläinen
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[Tornoci Laszlo]

Joonas Hämäläinen wrote:

> Hips,
>
> I was asking similar question in horde mailing list yesterday, but was
> directed to search i18n list. I didn't find answers via search, so I'll
> rephrase my question a bit and ask again. :)
>
> I have multinational horde installation, running old horde version. I am
>  in need to update it into current version, and of course keep old data
> for users.
>
> So, very hard bottom question is what character settings I should use in
> horde? It seems to default in utf8, but if I take old db and upgrade it
> for new version, there are entries which doesn't look correct.
>
> Old system has latin1_swedish_ci collation. Server itself has
> en_US.UTF-8 locale. That old horde doesn't have such charset setting.

A simple conversion provided by mysql is not good, because the db
entries are php serialized arrays, and a conversion is likely to change
the lengths of the strings as well. Some script needs to be written for
this purpose. I would be very happy to see some good soul to write and
publish such a script with a short clear guide how to use it. I guess it
is not too difficult to do this, I just don't know enough php.


                                        Yours: Laszlo


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