4-byte Characters in Different Databases
PhixFlow stores its data in a database. The recommended database configurations, described on the Database page, mean your instance of PhixFlow can store UTF8 characters in its database. However, the different databases handle 4-byte characters (such as emojis) differently.
| Database | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Oracle | Stores 4-byte characters correctly. |
| SQL Server | Discards or converts 4-byte characters. |
| MariaDB | Fails to store 4-byte characters because it only recognises a sub-set of UTF8 (UTF8mb3/UTF8mb4). |
If you are loading data from another database, a file or emails, you will need to either escape or remove any invalid characters before writing to PhixFlow running on MariaDB.
For information about how to excape characters, see Text Expressions and Escape Characters.
Removing Characters
The following regex lists the characters expected in a JSON file and removes invalid characters from it. You could adapt this regex to validate an data that you want to load into PhixFlow.
replaceAll(JSON Code,"[^\\p{Space}0-9A-Za-z!:\\\"%&\\[*()\\],-/_\\\\{}\\.]","")
For information about how this line uses escape characters, see Regular Expressions.
An alternative expression for matching characters that are valid in MariaDB is:
[^\u0000-\u0FFF]
See Also