Re: Encoding conversion problem

Andrea wrote:
> Hi Lew,
> 
>> I uinderstand my confusion now - it stemmed from the phrase "the
encoding of
>> the JVM".  The JVM itself only uses one encoding; it translates to and
from
>> other encoding on I/O.  So to make sure I understood you correctly,
were you
>> referring to the encoding specified by the I/O call?
> Maybe I don't understand :-(
> In my posts I tried to specify the encoding of the DBMS and the JVM
> encoding (i.e. the system property file.encoding) in the different
> cases and, as you stated, the JVM performs the necessary translations.
> In my JDBC calls I don't specify/force any encoding.
> 
> 
>> Generally if the encoding you specify for I/O is different from the
encoding
>> in your data store, it will cause trouble.  This is not limited to
Java.  Over
>> in the Postgres newsgroups one finds people have trouble with character
>> encoding from all sorts of platforms, mostly stemming from trying to
store
>> characters in a column that are not part of the specified character
encoding
>> for the DB.  If such things don't match, then problems will hatch.
> I disagree...
> For our application we keep the DBMS with a fixed encoding and the
> application performs the necessary conversions. For instance for
> polish installations we use an ISO-8859-1 database and an application
> server configured with ISO-8859-2 where we store polish characters
> without problems.
> 
> Andrea

Hello Andrea,

Using an incomplete database encoding that does not match the 
application is a dangerous practice that only works by a coincidence. It 
is just because the encodings you mention are 8-bit complete that you 
can pass in and out 8-bit values untouched, even though they really can 
mean something different inside the DB from how you interpret them in 
your application.
With little exception it is never a good idea to use a database encoding 
other then a complete encoding like UTF-8 (to be honest you should 
always use this in a DB if you are left the choice).
If the applications are Java based you will have a perfect match that 
way and only when you do stuff like generating emails, plain-text files 
or Office do***ents (****vers) where incomplete encodings (code pages) 
come into the game you have to take extra measures. Using the platform 
encoding then is usually a good idea unless it is a server application 
in which case you have to make an educated guess.

Regards,

Silvio