Re: Decoding data from the database in DBD

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 08:01:02PM +0100, Martin J. Evans wrote:
> 
> o returning the data in some native codepage like windows-1252 does
> not help you really, it probably hinders you and in any case you can
> encode it as windows-1252 afterwards when you output it somewhere.
> 
> As a result, I think it was probably an omission when DBD::ODBC was
> changed to support Unicode that it continued to retrieve varchar
> columns as SQL_CHAR and it should retrieve them as SQL_WCHAR (so
> long as the driver supports this - there is a SQLGetInfo call to
> check). In this way the data retrieved to a Perl script should
> always be accurate and can easily be translated to other charsets
> and encodings if that is what you need. The hopefully slight
> downside is that anyone running code with DBD::ODBC as it stands and
> like the person who started this on rt, if they know the data was
> coming back as windows-1252 (or whatever) and attempt to decode it,
> they will get the wrong data as it is already unicode characters.
> 
> I propose to change DBD::ODBC to always bind varchar etc columns as
> SQL_WCHAR and hence get unicode data in the unicode build but add a
> connection attribute to return it to the previous behaviour. I could
> have done it the other way around but this default seems more
> logical to me.
> 
> If you have any comments before I make this change I'd be happy to
> hear them.

Sounds good to me. Thanks.

Tim.