> To enable localization of our new platform, we thought that saving all
> character strings as UNICODE would be a good idea. Even if the front-end
> (PHP) doesn't fully support UNICODE yet, we figured it's still good to have
> the database in that format, for the future. We have not installed
> mb_string.
>
> We have created a UNICODE database and started experimenting with it
> (PostgreSQL)
> ./configure --enable-multibyte
> createdb -E UNICODE me-e
>
> My question is: do you need to convert strings to UTF-8 before adding them
> to the database, or is that done "automatically"?
PostgreSQL 7.1 can do the conversion in the backend side. You need to
add an option "--enable-unicode-conversion", however. Also, you need
to tell what kind of encoding you are using in your applications. To
do it in PHP4, you could use pg_set_client_encoding function.
If your PHP installation does not have it, you could issue a SQL:
set client_encoding to 'encoding_name_in_your_PHP_applicatoion';
--
Tatsuo Ishii