Re: ActiveSupport::Multibyte for better Unicode support

On 21/09/2006, at 12:15 AM, DHH wrote:

>> We would like to see ActiveSupport::Multibyte included in Rails so
>> that developers can start depending on it for simpler and better
>> Unicode support.
>
> I concur. Let this start an official request for comments. Any
> objections to getting this into core?

I'm definitely in favour of seeing something like this in core.  
Better unicode handling is needed yesterday! The chars proxy is a  
very nice way of handling this.

A question:

How does this compare to the unicode_hacks plugin? (See http:// 
julik.textdriven.com/svn/tools/rails_plugins/unicode_hacks/) They  
seem very similar in both intent and interface.

Some comments:

Even with this plugin, supporting unicode in a Rails app is too  
complicated and fiddly. For those who haven't tried it, here are the  
steps:

- Make sure your database character set is utf8
- Make sure all your tables have a character set of utf8
- Make sure your database.yml has 'encoding: utf8' set for each database
- Put $KCODE='u' in your environment.rb
- Add an after_filter to application.rb to set the Content-Type  
header correctly
- Add 'normalize_unicode_params :form => :kc' to your application.rb

Missing one of these steps can produce strange results and corrupted  
data.

If unicode support is being included in core, then this needs to be  
rationalised. Ideally a single setting in environment.rb should take  
care of all of this. I also think it should be enabled by default.  
(Who doesn't want to support unicode nowadays?)

Rumour also has it that ActiveRecord, when recreating timed-out  
database connections, doesn't honour the 'encoding: utf8' setting.  
I've never run into this personally, so I assume it was fixed at some  
point?

Cheers,

Pete Yandell

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