A question of UTF-8

[René Seindal <rene seindal dk>]

Hi,

I have an application that is a frontend for a database which then
drives a web-site.

The database is in ISO-8859-1 with loads of European 8-bit characters.

Gtk2 and perl 5.8 prefers utf8.

The only thing I do to confront the situation is that on saving data to
the database, I convert everything to ISO-8859-1 using
Encode::encode('ISO_8859-1', $data).

Apparently it works, mostly due to the magic worked by perl 5.8, I
guess.

Do anybody have experience with these things?
Are there pitfalls I should be aware of?

The last thing I want is to find most of my database doubly encoded to
utf8 :-(

The database is Mysql 4.0.13.  Mysql 4.1 supports utf8 directly, which
should make life a lot easier.


-- 
René Seindal (rene seindal dk)                  http://sights.seindal.dk/