[turba] Turba and character set encoding

[Otto Stolz]

Hello Piotr Legiecki,

you have written:
> Wonder what happens when I add contact using polish characters with my 
> firefox which says that this page is in utf8? There must be some kind of 
> conversion between my input and mysql?

Why do you insist in storing your contact data in ISO 8859-2?

A user can enter any conceivable character in the WWW form,
e. g. by using a particular keyboard driver, or via the cut-
and-paste operation provided by the underlying OS. Particularily
for contact data, this makes sense, as your pen-pals (or should
I rather say: “keyboard pals”?) may well bear non-Polish names
(Lithunia is not so far from Poland, after all).

Hence,
- every WWW form should accept Unicode data (preferably UTF-8),
- the addressbook, at least the Name, and Street-Address fields,
   should be stored in Unicode (preferably UTF-8).
If both teh WWW form and the Database are in the same Unicode
encoding scheme, no conversion needs to take place between front-
and backend.

Best wishes,
   Otto Stolz