#
# Copyright (c) 2009, Michael H. Buselli
# See LICENSE for details.  All other rights reserved.
#

=======

Installation:

    gem install active_record_encoding --source=http://gems.cosine.org/

=======

#
# ActiveRecordEncoding — Module to make ActiveRecord aware of Unicode
# encoding issues.  It should be used only if the underlying database
# and its driver does not or cannot properly handle the encoding of the
# data it returns (usually as "ASCII-8BIT").  Most databases can
# properly encode data, however, so your first assumption should be that
# you do not need this software unless you really know you need it.
#
# ActiveRecordEncoding keeps a variables for each column and table
# where encoding is requested so it knows how the data is encoded in the
# database.  This variable is called its external_encoding.
#
# External encodings must be defined for each column or table where
# a translation is to occur, and this is done in the model definition:
#
#   class User < ActiveRecord::Base
#     external_encoding 'ISO-8859-1', :for => :comment
#     external_encoding 'ISO-8859-1', :for => [:first_name, :last_name]
#   end
#
# Data is converted to UTF-8 when passed to the user.
#
# When data is being saved back to the database, it is assumed that the
# data is in UTF-8, or on Ruby 1.9 if the String's encoding value is
# something other than "ASCII-8BIT" it uses that encoding.
#