[erlang-questions] Web servers and unicode support?

[Bryan Fink]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 9:08 PM, Fred Janon <fjanon@REDACTED> wrote:
> I want to design a web application with support for European,  Asian
> languages as well as English, meaning Unicode. I am very interested in doing
> that in Erlang with Mnesia or MySQL or Postgres (when I figure out if I can
> use Mnesia), but what would I need to use (web server, extensions) to
> support these languages/Unicode? I saw a few posting about not so great
> String support in Erlang, therefore even less for Unicode. What's the
> status?

Hi, Fred.  Like a few others here, I also have a website running on
Erlang (mochiweb/webmachine/mnesia) right now, and it also handles
UTF-8 just fine.  For what it's worth, UTF-16 would have worked just
as well, but UTF-8 was more convenient, given the set of services the
website communicates with (solr, facebook, browsers, ...).

For actually working with unicode text (not just storing & fetching),
I've found the Starling project's links to the ICU library to be quite
helpful:

http://12monkeys.co.uk/starling/

The unpublicized xmerl_ucs module included with Erlang releases also
has some useful tools for converting among character encodings, if
you're unable to use R13B's unicode module.

-Bryan