Good day - I operate a site where (adult) event organizers can promote their upcoming events. Currently, I the site allows people to promote events in the United States only. That is because I wanted to work the bugs out, and because I needed to communicate about those bugs in English. I would now like to allow the promotion of events in Canada and Mexico. As these listings may be written in English, Spanish or French, I think this means that I need to learn some about character sets and collation in MySQL databases. I'd appreciate any suggestions on where to begin to study these topics? I think I probably should start with the "For Real Dummies" version and work up from there. Many thanks in advance. Steve E.
What collation are you currently using? As long as you don't require multi byte character sets, which typically include some eastern languages, latin1 should be fine. If you are currently using UTF8 that would be fine as well.
Hi, and thank you for your note. I currently use latin_swedish_ci, which is the default on the server, and I use the utf-8 character set, also the default. I did some other research on this over the weekend; I'm thinking that I was either confused about this or was overthinking it, not realizing the extent of the coverage that utf-8 would provide. So I'm going to give this a try. Thank you again.