Unicode from Web to MySQL

[John Benson]

Making my way through the list, I was very happy to see Francis Avila's
discussion of Unicode. I was trying to work up enough courage to ask for
something like this, and was very happy to see it appear spontaneously. My
only quibble would be to characterize Unicode as a mapping from numbers to
glyphs (instead of letters), since symbols from foreign alphabets sometimes
look more like squashed bugs than letters.

Some of us are old enough to have dealt at oscilloscope level with devices
where a 7- or 8-bit number comes in from the wire and then hits the screen
or the paper as a two-dimensional symbol, making the generalization of ASCII
to Unicode easy to get. But I was completely in the dark about the
status/visibility/nature of the internal Unicode representation and it's
connection to the encode and decode operations.

Thanks for the help.