[Lazarus] Losing data when saving Database fileds with "Size" defined and UTF8 chars

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2013-07-15 17:43, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
> 
> Another workaround: use the appropriate codepage for storing strings in 
> the database, so that all characters are single bytes.

You should know by now that not all characters can be represented in a
single byte. Also Unicode was developed to overcome the many code-page
issues and standardise text storage. So I think it would be silly using
anything other than one of the Unicode encodings (I would opt for UTF-8
or UTF-16) in this day and age.

The missing link is fixing SqlDB or Zeos etc, as it seems that the
database servers themselves already support UTF-8 and UTF-16 text
fields. [at least Firebird does]

My solution (work-around) for now is to not specify a charset for
Firebird and always store text as UTF-8. My fields are defined as
follows [in bytes size]: <desired size in characters> * 1.5
By business objects are coded to notify the user interface to only allow
<desired size in characters> text input. 6 years on, and I haven't had a
single client complain that text was truncated [maybe a little bit of
luck has something to do with it too]. I guess I must also add that our
products are mainly geared towards English, Afrikaans and Portuguese. So
large quantities of multi-byte characters are at a minimum.


Regards,
  - Graeme -