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mysqlutf-8collationvarcharmultilingual

Varchar for UTF-8?

I found a similar post about this but still not sure.

As I am making my guestbook and so forth multi-language I changed the collation to uft8_unicode_ci in mysql, everything works as it should, something that I did not think of was the type I use, my guestbook is multi-language and for the name field a user cannot enter more than 50 characters, same for subject and 800 characters for guestbook message.

Now doing this check in PHP is straight forward ie. checking string length using the mb_ before strlen etc.

But I am concerned that data maybe truncated in mysql. Obviously normal characters will be ok but when it's Chinese characters and other non-standard characters obviously this is a concern for me as i don't know how varchar will calculate them.

Solution

  • Since mySQL 4.1, VARCHAR counts in characters instead of bytes.

    You can safely specify a VARCHAR(255) type for a message field that needs to hold 255 characters.