[mythtv-users] Foreign character sets

[Eric Sharkey]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 1:37 AM, Nick Rout <nick.rout at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Well, tmdb manages quite well.  It's gotten many of the films right, so
>> mysql + myth handles the characters.  The problem is getting them stuffed in
>> there.
>>
>> I have no clue how to do that.  :-(
>
> Me neither. Living in an English speaking country has insulated me
> from the complexities of internationalisation!

You might think so, but even operating in a purely English speaking
environment, the world is increasing full of non-ASCII characters.
For example, I have a rip of the movie WALL-E managed by mythVideo,
and when I pulled down the metadata from IMDB, I was surprised that it
set the title WALL·E.  You'll need to look carefully to see the
difference there.  In the first case, between the L and E I used an
ASCII character 0x2D (ASCII HYPHEN-MINUS) while the title for IMDB
used the multibyte UTF-8 sequence 0xC2 0xB7 (Unicode MIDDLE DOT).  As
far as mythTV is concerned, there isn't much difference between
supporting characters like MIDDLE DOT, and other scripts like kanji.

MythTV uses UTF-8 for database strings and you should be allowed to
enter any valid UTF-8 text in any of these locations.  In the mysql
command line client you can use the \C command to explicitly set the
UTF8 and can just insert or update any strings you need.

Eric