Can I have fields containing non-latin characters (for example, Hebrew) in my database?
Yes but there is one precaution that you need to take. You must save your database file (the one you created per the instructions in question 403) as a unicode file (UTF-8 with no signature or BOM character) rather than as an ascii file. Many text editors (e.g., Microsoft’s notepad) will warn you when you save the file that it contains non-latin characters and will tell you how to save it as unicode. You cannot do a sounds-like search on a field that contains non-latin characters. If this is something that is important to you, then you’ll have to devise a soundex system on your character set and then customizing the generated search engine to use that soundex system. Of course this requires considerable programming knowledge. If you’d like to see a demonstration of a search application that uses Hebrew characters, click here.
