[development] 'name' column length in variables

[Rob Thorne]

I'm dubious this would help even in 4.1 and after...

This would only help us if MySQL stores UTF8 internally as UCS2 (i.e., 
two byte Unicode), or maybe UTF16 (i.e., 4 byte Unicode folded back to 2 
bytes), since that would guarantee that each and every character would 
have 2 bytes reserved for it.

I'm guessing, though, that when MySQL says the encoding in the DB is 
UTF-8, they mean that literally, and an Arabic glyph is going to take up 
3 bytes of storage space, and an ASCII character will take up only 1.  
This is instead of the one byte that an Arabic glyph takes up in 
ISO-8859-6.   So if anything, using UTF8 will make the problem worse.

The real solution, I think, is to make the field width wider for 4.8 for 
everything, so that there's enough space for non-Latin scripts like Arabic.

Rob

Alaa Abd El Fattah wrote:
> On Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:08:06 -0500
> "Khalid B" <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:
>
>   
>>> I've hit that problem in several different places due to multibyte
>>> utf-8 chars
>>>
>>> what is sufficient as a node title or anonymous commenter name in
>>> latin letters is not enough at all when using arabic for instance,
>>> arabic names for cck types and fields will be more of a problem.
>>>       
>> I think this is no longer an issue. In HEAD, and a few betas for 4.7,
>> there is a change to force the charset for the tables to be utf-8.
>>     
>
> this wouldn't work with mysql 4.0 would it?
>
> cheers,
> Alaa
>