Re: Character encoding in database dumps

on 6/11/04 3:33 PM, Bruno Wolff III at bruno@wolff.to wrote:

>> Major headache, though. I'm hoping as things evolve, Unicode support will be
>> built into more programs including those where it's currently not thought
>> necessary like FTP programs. People need to learn that ASCII is *not*
>> necessarily the correct format for all text files...
> 
> The ascii mode in ftp is for files that need to be converted to or from
> using LF to end lines from or to using CRLF to end lines. Normally you want
> to do binary transfers.

I'm used to having to use ASCII on anything remotely CGI-related because
normally if I do binary transfers for any sort of CGI file it breaks the
script. But maybe that is the LF issue - I know MacOS, Windows and UNIX all
use different sorts of line returns and since CGIs are usually running on
UNIX systems, Mac or Windows line returns will mess everything up. I don't
know if PHP scripts are as sensitive...

But the bigger problem is that it seems like these days most FTP programs -
as well as browsers and text editors that have some FTP functionality -
automatically set the transfer mode based on the file extension (and text
editors like BBEdit *only* have ASCII transfer mode, presumably on the basis
that, hey, it's text, and text *always* means ASCII, right?). Some will
allow you to override that, some won't. That's why I had to change the
extension on my text data files and database dumps in order for a binary
transfer to even be possible.

It's really annoying - I hate software that thinks it knows what I'm trying
to do better than I do.


Lynna

-- 
Resource Centre Database Coordinator
Gallery 44
www.gallery44.org