We have a CMS which is written is based on php & mysql. Recently we received a request to support multiple languages so that sites in that particular laguage can be created. I did some search on the google and it seems I have to build in multibyte support for php and mysql. Mbstring (http://us3.php.net/mbstring) claims to support multiple languages with a caution saying it might not work properly.
After further research it seems unicode might be the way to go, since unicode can represents all characters (in all languages) with integers, which in turn can be handled in php as it has excellent integer support. But again since all the data is store in mysql we need unicode support for mysql too and it has 2 formats (http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Charset-Unicode.html) usc-2 (for storing data) and utf-8 (for encoding). Finally, we decide to stick with utf-8 as it could support more languages than usc-2 and also since php has utf-8 support. Our application evolved over time and it was not very long ago that we introduced a new DB layer. Even though efforts were made to change code to use this new DB layer, I am afraid there still might be instances where we use the php mysql functions to access db. We use egexes heavily and do a lot of text manipulation, so that rules out any chance of being closer to utf-8. So I am wondering if there are any good approaches to this issue i.e. modify the existing application code minimally to handle utf-8 (that doesn't sound right!) and make it all transparent to the presentation layer. Any suggestions or comments are welcome. Turi http://aijalon.net -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
