Hi,

Is it possible for a single text column to support multiple character
sets (i.e. chinese, japanese, greek...). I'm creating a language
flashcard system and want to make it open to any languages. I'm
currently also looking into the possibility of encoding the text into
a single type in the script (php) prior to inserting for the column
but wanted to check if column can support multiple character sets
first?

Thanks
Burnsy

El 25/02/2011 14:28, bizt escribió/wrote:
I suppose this is related to your question at "comp.lang.php". As I
answered there, I don't think your system actually needs to support
multiple charsets; it only needs to support multiple collations. To sum up:

- The alphabet is the set of symbols used by a certain language.

- The encoding is the way those symbols are mapped into a computer program.

- The collation is the set of rules that say how language-specific stuff
is handled, including sort order (does "ch" go between "ca" and "cz" or
between "cz" and "da"?), letter comparisons (is "a" the same as "á"), etc.

Said that, I think MySQL has quite a nice collation support. You can set
a different collation in each table and even in each individual column.
But it won't allow to set a different collation for each _row_ (I don't
think any DBMS allows such a thing). If you actually need it use
different collations, you probably need to rethink your DB design.


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On Fri, 25 Feb 2011 05:28:45 -0800 (PST), bizt wrote:
UTF-8, which MySQL supports, will allow characters in any of those
listed language.

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