On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Oded Arbel wrote:
> My experience is that mysql will sort hebrew well when not started or even compiled
>for hebrew support, with VARCHAR style data types (not binary). the character set
>support is useful when you to do case insensitive sorts,or handle aumels and accented
>characters properly - both cases are irrelevant for hebrew.
> Changing th type to binary will allow you to using the ordinance of characters,
>regardless of character sets, which would only give you more predictable results. any
>way - thischange (using the ALTER TABLE syntax) is non destructive.
>
> BTW: I prefer storing textual data in the database as unicode
> (preferably utf8 to facilitate easier display to the web) encoded data
> in binary fields - it gives predictable enough sorting, and you neednot
> worry about character sets, especially when aiming for multi-lingual
> applications (and I do consider english/hebrew being multi-lingual
> enough to warrant unicode).
>
What if there is some English text? case insensitive search is quite
problematic in some cases ('aaa' comes after 'ZZZ').
Also, if the UTF8 text includes nikud it has to be ignored-away during the
sorting.
IIRC proper utf collating would do the above two (this costs some extra
cpu cycles even when this collating is not used, I believe).
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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