Quote:
Originally Posted by muukis
I'm not that good with databases, but shouldn't the data be free from encoding when it's stored to a blob? Then the client which reads the blob decides the encoding? I'm not sure weather or not I should modify the plugin and/or the database and/or the PHP. As of the moment, afaik the plugin and the game displays all the names properly when read from the DB. If you display top 10 list for example. This leads me to assumption that the PHP is faulty. My PHP experience is quite short. I'm not sure how to proceed with this issue... I will leave this to last.
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No, actually the blob stores the text value while preserving the original encoding. That's why we're having these problems because now we have to guess what encoding was used. A complete PHP fix will be hard to achieve, the easiest way is to do away with the blobs and make sure the text stored in the database gets converted to UTF-8, and i think that would be best done at the plugin source.
The way this works is that UTF-8 is a multibyte encoding, and the others are single byte (bytes used per character). so its easy to tell the difference between what is UTF-8 and what isn't. The problem is telling the difference between all the other single byte encodings and character sets, since they all have pretty much the same structure, except that a byte value might correspond to a different character in another character set.
The client can't just use whatever character encoding it wants because if it chooses wrong then it gets the wrong characters in the name. Actually the client just uses what we tell it to use and we're wrong sometimes. So in order to make things work smoothly we have to make sure everything is one single encoding. UTF-8 is the international standard which works for all languages.
Oh, and another plus for no blobs for the names is that player search in the website can be case insensitive
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