{"id":3712,"date":"2014-03-15T15:22:14","date_gmt":"2014-03-15T05:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/?p=3712"},"modified":"2014-03-15T15:22:14","modified_gmt":"2014-03-15T05:22:14","slug":"the-joy-of-unicode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2014\/03\/15\/the-joy-of-unicode\/","title":{"rendered":"The joy of Unicode"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, back in late 2008, rather soon after we got to start working on Drizzle<\/a> full time, someone discovered unicodesnowmanforyou.com<\/a>, or:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u02dc\u0192<\/div>\n

Since we had decided that Drizzle was going to be UTF-8 everywhere,(after seeing for years how hard it was for people to get character sets correct in MySQL) we soon added \u00e2\u02dc\u0192.test to the tree, which tried a few interesting things:<\/p>\n

CREATE TABLE \u00e2\u02dc\u0192; CREATE DATABASE \u00e2\u02dc\u0192; etc etc
\n<\/tt><\/p>\n

Because what better to show off UTF-8 than using odd Unicode characters for table names, database names and file names. Well… it turns out we were all good except if you attempted to check out the source tree on Solaris. It was some combination of Python, Bazaar and Solaris that meant you just got python stacktraces and no source tree. So, if you look now it’s actually snowman.test and has been since the end of 2008, because Solaris 10.<\/p>\n

A little while later, I was talking to Anthony Baxter at OSDC in Sydney and he mentioned Unicode above 2^16 in UTF-8…. so, we had clef.test (we’d learned since \u00e2\u02dc\u0192 and we were not going to tall it \u00f0\u009d\u201e\u00a2.test).<\/p>\n

Fast forward a few years to, well, this week, and I was talking to Jeremy Kerr about petitboot<\/a> and telling the tail of snowman.test. So out came the crazy Unicode characters:<\/p>\n