cyrillic chars - should I upgrade mysql or php
 

Hi

(I had this message on the newbie forum, but since no one there seemed able to help, I am posting it here)

I am making a website, which will have pages also in Russian. I've managed to insert cyrillic characters in the mysql (3.23.55) database. But am I right assuming that Php 4.3.0 does not support koi8_ru charset.

The other option would be to use Unicode (UTF-8 ) But then, am I right assuming that Mysql 3.23.55 does not support Unicode. And I am not finding any documentation about whether Mysql 4.0 would support Unicode or not.

I am sort of a newbie to all this and I dread the idea of upgrading either Mysql or Php, because my previous experience tells me that with my inadequate skills the server will anyway be down for days (or even weeks).

What do you think would be the least trouble's way:
a) to upgrade PhP to support koi8_ru
b) to upgrade Mysql to support Unicode (will 4.0 do it?)
c) neither of the above. But what?

Please help!

PS my server is SoL 16 which is a bit old distro, but because it's been running so smoothly and beautifully, I REALLY dread the idea of upgrading it. But can I count on it supporting Unicode? Again the documentation I find about it makes no mention about Unicode either way. But at least some configuration-xml-files in the system have encoding="UTF-8". Does that settle it?