[Athens-pm] greek chars

[Michael K. Nacos]

hi Mark

in my experience, it doesn't really matter whether the characters in the database are in a human-readable form. as soon as you serve them up on a web page they display fine again.

having said that, what's causing you trouble is a difference in the way DOS and Windows handle greek characters (this might extend to other languages, i really can't say). Perfectly readable greek text in Word won't be readable in Notepad and vice versa. what you really wanna do is do away with all this Windows - DOS nonsense and save your Word documents as plain text with ISO encoding (pl. see picture). Whether the characters will look O.K. in your text editor depends on the configuration of your system. ISO Greek may not be readable in Notepad, but it's a much cleaner solution for storing text into the database. you can also easily convert ISO Greek to Unicode.

try this on your linux box

iconv --from-code=ISO-8859-7 --to-code=UTF-8 iso-file.txt > utf-file.txt

for people with too much time on their hands, here's a link to a page describing the differences between the ISO-8859-7 and windows-1253 encodings.

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/unicode/greek.html

michael

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