To supplement the excellent advice given above, I'd like to add that you should take care to know your display tools really well, to make sure that valid utf8 data is displayed correctly. This involves whatever text editor, terminal window, browser or other display method you use to check your data. It can also be a good idea to have two or more independent ways to look at the contents of the database.

It will help to have tools that allow you to view utf8 text data in a more detailed, explicit manner -- for example (shameless plug), I posted a couple command-line scripts that can help for both confirming valid utf8 data and diagnosing faulty data: tlu -- TransLiterate Unicode, and unichist -- count/summarize characters in data. They might help you in figuring out a suitable idiom for handling your text data in a way that avoids corruption.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.