Re: Add Unicode Support to the DBI

On Oct 13, 2011, at 6:03 AM, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:

>> I think what I haven't said is that we should just use the same 
>> names that Perl I/O uses. Er, well, for the :raw and :utf8 
>> varieties I was, anyway. Perhaps we should adopt it wholesale, 
>> so you'd use ":encoding(UTF-8)" instead of "UTF-8".
> 
> That's pretty ugly. I don't think we need to adopt the I/O 
> convention, as there is no direct mapping anyway, it just 
> confuses the issue.

Sure. In that case, I'd say ":utf8", ":raw", or "$encoding".

>> For DBD::Pg, at least, if client-encoding is set to Big5, then 
>> you *have* to encode to send it to the database. Or change the 
>> client encoding, of course.
> 
> Not sure I'm following this completely. Or rather, why this should 
> be the DBDs role.

By default, yes, the DBD should DTRT here. But I think there also ought to be a way to tell it what to do.

>>> How would one map things - just demand that 
>>> whatever is given must be a literal encoding the particular database 
>>> can understand?
>> 
>> I think we should standardize on the Perl IO names for these things. 
>> Some databases may not support them all, of course.
> 
> Hm... I don't know enough about the various DB's encodings to see 
> how good an idea that is.

I assume that it's all over the map, so we should be as general as we can. Specifying an encoding by name should cover everything.

>> No, I think just "encoding", and "utf8" would be invalid, 
>> but ":encoding(UTF-8)" would not.
> 
> Again, ugh. Although a *little* less confusing when contrasting:
> 
> $dbh->{encoding} = ':encoding(utf-8)';
> 
> $dbh->{encoding} = 'utf8';

Yeah, or we can go with my original suggestion:

    $dbh->{encoding} =  'UTF-8';
    $dbh->{encoding} =  ':utf8';

>> Well, I think we might have to have it with the pg_prefix until 
>> this stuff is finalized here. Not sure, though.
> 
> That's my point - if we can get it finalized here, we can avoif the 
> pg_prefix entirely, rather than add it now and then deprecate it later.

Sure. I suspect this is going to take a while, though.

Best,

David