Re: Database connectivity

[William Ahern <william@...>]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 04:05:46PM -0500, Daurnimator wrote:
<snip>
> So, I probably would not use your library unless you put quite a lot of
> effort in; This would include things like non-blocking forms, and
> consistent encodings (e.g. MySQL you need utf8mb4).

Wow. I just read this page

	http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-unicode-utf8mb4.html

where it is says

	The character set named utf8 uses a maximum of three bytes per
	character and contains only BMP characters. As of MySQL 5.5.3, the
	utf8mb4 character set uses a maximum of four bytes per character
	supports supplemental characters.

	...

	For a supplementary character, utf8 cannot store the character at
	all, while utf8mb4 requires four bytes to store it. Since utf8
	cannot store the character at all, you do not have any supplementary
	characters in utf8 columns and you need not worry about converting
	characters or losing data when upgrading utf8 data from older
	versions of MySQL.

That's horrendous. I didn't think my opinion about the quality of MySQL
could sink any lower. They can't even do the honorable thing and explicitly
say (rather than leave it implied) that the problem isn't with UTF-8, but
"utf8", a bastardized encoding with a confusingly similar name.