Showing characters from non-ascii languages

[Michael Gilkes]

Hi everyone!

I am in the process of figuring out how to handle non-ascii and non-8859-1 characters. In my search on how to handle it, I have com across a several sites that explain the problem. One forum topic that I want to share with everyone is the one below, and I am sharing it in hopes that someone will try out what it says and give me some feedback so that I can figure out the best way to handle the problem:

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=485&t=272363

From what i can tell so far, you can fix your non-ascii character problems by doing one or more of the following:

• properly setting the charset setting to utf-8 in the php.ini
• setting a meta tag with the charset of utf-8
• setting the page header in index.php via php

Hope this helps you guys!

[savvasha]

Hello michael. I try each and every way to fix the problem with non-ascii characters (greek characters) but with no luck.

The strange part of it is that if I place an echo with greek characters anywhere in your script it appears ok…

Hope you will find the problem and fix it soon 🙂

[Michael Gilkes]

@savvasha. Hi! Thanks for your feedback! I would love to know what you actually tried. Oh, it also would be helpful if I could view your page that shows the problem. The only way that I have been able to reproduce the problem is when I don’t have a charset meta tag. But, the funny thing is that Joomla puts that in automatically (at least, that’s what I have observed).

If you don’t mind, could you send me a link to the page that has the listing so that I can see for myself, and examine the page?

I am just about to release version 1.0, and I want to have this issue solved for the new release. So, I need all the help I can get.

[savvasha]

I try to set the default charset to utf-8 in php.ini -> No Luck

The meta tags are auto set to utf-8 from Joomla. I dont want to change this becase my whole site is in greek -> utf-8.

GO to the following url : http://www.pafos24.com/poli-istoria/ekklisies-monastiria/4257-ekklisia-tis-theoskepastis.html.

You will notice the Testig – Δοκιμή near to the top of the site. There are listed two identical files. The one with only latin characters, and the other with greek characters. When the encoding of the browser is set to UTF-8 (auto mode) the greek characters are shown as ???????. If you manually change your encoding (from browser) to ISO-8859-7 (the greek ISO), the folder listing shows correct, but everything else in the site are screwed up…

Let me know if you want anything else 😉

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