Hi Björn,
The time for more than 4 bytes in UTF8 will never come, and even the emojis expand so that more than 1112064 “characters” , new encoding will not be called UTF8 anymore, and I doubt it will even be called Unicode.
UTF8 is not up to 7 characters. While the encoding scheme with leading/trailing bytes could allow for more than 4 bytes, this was explicitly clarified and forbidden in the RFC3629 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629#section-4 , along with encoding of unpaired “surrogate” characters from UTF16, so basically UTF8 can encode everything in UTF16, and not more than that.
The utf8mb4 story is that - there was a discussion IIRC during MySQL 5.5 development, whether to continue using UTF8 name or whether to create a new name, for the Unicode (2.0+) conforming charset. As you noticed , traditional MySQL’s version of UTF8 is castrated. On the other hand, reusing a name for something different could possibly lead to compatibility problems with existing applications. The conservative decision was for the new name for the real (in Unicode sense) UTF8. The “utf8mb4” name is not pretty, confusing, but no compatibility problems were reported.
From: Björn Keil
Sent: Friday, 11 October 2019 12:10
To: maria-discuss@lists.launchpad.net
Subject: Re: [Maria-discuss] Limited Unicode Support?
Thanks for the replies. I've tried to just replace all occurrences of "utf8" in my example with "utf8mb4" and it works.
Inconveniently this will require major conversations and down times for my application, but at least I know what I must do to make it work.
However, the "mb4" sounds a little suspicious, though. While there are no sufficiently high numbered Unicode Points yet that would make such a measure necessary, the UTF-8 encoding allows for up to seven byte long characters, if I am not mistaken. Does utf8mb4 allow for more than four byte long characters if in and when the time comes?
Am Do., 10. Okt. 2019 um 17:18 Uhr schrieb Diego Dupin <diego.dupin@mariadb.com>: