Why it didn't work out with Rekall (yet)
A couple of days ago I made Rekall work with MySQL on OS X. And now I’m not really using it!
There is a big showstopper for maintaining german content (or in any other language that uses more than the 7 bit ASCII character set): Rekall (on the Mac) doesn’t handle Unicode correctly. Here’s a short sample: to the left the expected display (from phpMyAdmin), to the right the screen shot from Rekall:
What if I entered the umlaut in Rekall? Then phpMyAdmin shows the content as if it wouldn’t know how to display UTF-8 codes:
What happens is that the transformation takes place twice:
- The UTF-8 transformation of ‘ä’ (
0xE4) is ‘ä’ (0xC3 0xA4) as shown in the second phpMyAdmin screen shot. - The UTF-8 transformation of ‘ä’ is
0xC3 0x83 0xC2 0xA4, which is what is stored in the database, as a hexdump shows.
I have seen the same strange glyphs for umlauts in another Mac port of a multi platform program: Perforce P4V in Version 2005.1 has the same problem:
Because Rekall and P4V both are based on the Qt library, I think it’s actually a bug in the Mac port of Qt; I have never used Rekall on other platforms, but I know that the Windows port of the same version of P4V shows the umlaut as expected:
