Serendipity Forums

Since I upgraded to the latest version of Serendipity my weblog (http://www.i-tjingcentrum.nl/serendipity/) is always displayed in Unicode, which produces � characters at certain places. I thought I could resolve this by hardcoding 'charset=ISO-8859-1' in the template header, but that doesn't help: Firefox and IE still choose Unicode as character set, and I have to manually switch to 'Western'. What should I do to change this? Is it a browser problem or a weblog problem?

Harmen.

Hi!

Check your s9y configuration and make sure that the language is set to "Native" and not "UTF-8". Also it might help, if you set the option "Use database charsets" to the value that is currently NOT selected (flip it).

HTH,
Garvin

Hi Garvin,

Thanks for your help, but I accidentally found the solution - not in the options you described (they were set okay), but in the language files. The Dutch language file had UTF-8 as encoding, while the English and other languages had Western encoding. When I changed the Dutch language's encoding the strange markings disappeared.

I wonder why the Dutch file has UTF-8, while they other languages use Western encoding.

Hi!

Yes, indeed the s9y file for dutch only exists in a UTF-8 variant. The original translator mentioned there were problems in ISO-8859-1 where certain characters were not available, so we never offered a "western encoding".

You could fix this by encoding your file locally as ISO-8859-1 and changing SQL_CHARSET an dLANG_CHARSET, but we can't at this point do this generally because users that already use dutch, are already using UTF-8.

I assume you only switched to dutch recently and previously had english or so?! Nowadays, the best recommendable charset is UTF-8 (also default for new s9y installations) to prevent encoding issues like these...

Regards,
Garvin

garvinhicking wrote:You could fix this by encoding your file locally as ISO-8859-1 and changing SQL_CHARSET an dLANG_CHARSET, but we can't at this point do this generally because users that already use dutch, are already using UTF-8.

I only changed the dLANG_CHARSET, not the SQL_CHARSET. Should I change that also? It all looks fine to me now.

I assume you only switched to dutch recently and previously had english or so?!

Well, no, it always automatically chooses Dutch, which is fine.

Nowadays, the best recommendable charset is UTF-8 (also default for new s9y installations) to prevent encoding issues like these...

I know, but I can't change that in the preferences withou messing up the text of all the entries, can I?

But it seems to be okay now, If I don't see anymore glitches I'll just leave it as it is.

I like the way Serendipity handles Chinese characters: by using 王配 type of codes. Whatever the selected encoding, the characters always show up right! Brilliant!

Best,

Harmen.