Thread

Hi,

I"m creating a site in En, Fr and Sp.  I have found a lot of help on these forums, and things are going well.

I am trying to convert all (?) the EE databases to UTF-8 char set (from the latin setting).
I am doing this because I believe that I need member data (member names, addresses, etc.), and Blog/Channel data to both be written to the Database in utf, in case there are french or spanish characters.

I am not having any luck changing the fields in the actual tables in the ee db, and I am wondering if maybe this is overkill.  Is this necessary even?

My needs are only around membership and blogs/news/events.  So I just want to make sure the db is capable of saving and returning french and spanish language effectively.

Thanks for any help.

Phoebe

No, you probably don’t have to convert your database. Spanish has a few accents and the ñ, French the same plus ç. All characters are part of ISO-8859-1 / 1-8859-15 as well. I still recommend to use UTF-8 for your site, but there’s probably no need to mess with the db collation.

So, if someone puts in a name that has a french accent in it, as their screenname, or whatever, the database will have no issues storing that in the member database, whcih looks like a latin char set still, and then spitting it back out with the proper accent?

I’m concerned that if the DB tables are not utf-8, then will normal accents and such get messed up in the database?  I’m confused, I think, about how the DB stores a french character. Have to read up on it.

thanks,

Phoebe

So, if someone puts in a name that has a french accent in it, as their screenname, or whatever, the database will have no issues storing that in the member database, whcih looks like a latin char set still, and then spitting it back out with the proper accent?

Yes, that’s right.

I’m concerned that if the DB tables are not utf-8, then will normal accents and such get messed up in the database?

No, I don’t think that’s reason for concern.

I’m confused, I think, about how the DB stores a french character.

It doesn’t really matter as long as it’s properly translated. Luckily both Latin-1 and Unicode contain the needed subset of characters.

Gotcha.

Thanks!  That makes things much easier.  I just put in the language packs for the CP, which work awesomely.

-phoebe

Sounds good. I am going to make this one as “Resolved” for now, but if you’re having any issues in that regard, please start a new thread, we’re happy to help 😊