Migrating from Latin-1 to UTF-8
You'd think this sort of problem would be resolved by now, but it's not. It's still almost impossible to quickly and easily migrate an application from the too common default Latin-1 to UTF-8 character set encoding. The problem isn't that UTF-8 can't handle the conversion. No, that's definitely not it. UTF-8 can represent any Latin-1 character and much, much more. The problem is that the Latin-1 charset is so deeply ingrained as the default in every software interface that you just have so many faulty conversion points. A conversion point is a handoff point between one software component and another, a place where character encodings matter and where faulty conversions are way too common.
Here's an example: a simple web application that stores names and addresses in a database. Chances are, if you haven't done anything explicit to change this, the web page itself will have no charset encoding associated with it. And neither will your application server. And neither will your database. And without explicit settings, many applications use Latin-1 as the default character set. So, you'll be able to enter, store, retrieve, and display common Western European names, but you won't be able to handle Russian or Japanese or Chinese or, well, you get the idea.
So let's imagine you decide to convert from Latin-1 to UTF-8 so that you open up your application to the rest of the world's languages and scripts. What does that mean? What must you do? How do you start?
Here are some of the charset conversion points you'll need to resolve as you migrate through this problem:
- database tables
- database connections
- application and/or web server frameworks
- web page
- form encodings
- JavaScript or other browser scripts
To help you get started, I've discussed the first 4 conversion points in the article Character Conversions from Browser to Database. Go ahead, take a look. But come back here to let me know what you think.
I'll talk about some of the JavaScript issues in an upcoming blog.
Posted at 10:26PM Apr 12, 2008 by John O'Conner in Unicode |
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