[drupal-support] Charset problem

[Steven Wittens]

Steve Dondley wrote:

> I'm using mysql 3.23 and Drupal 4.5 on an Apache/Linux server, PHP 
> version 4.10.  My older version of MySQL stores all text as latin1, 
> the equivalent of iso-8859-1 extended.  But I notice that Drupal 
> outputs pages using the utf-8 character set. This is causing problems 
> with the extended iso-8859-1 characters (Micorsoft's curly quotes, 
> etc.) and they usually show up as question marks in the text.
>
> To solve the problem, I changed the charset argument in the 
> drupal_set_header() function to iso-8859-1.  This took care of the 
> problem.  But now, of course, any UTF-8 encoded text shows  funky 
> characters.
>
> What's the best way to get Drupal to output both UTF-8 and iso-8859-1 
> extended characters properly?

Switching Drupal's encoding from UTF-8 to something else is not very 
advisable and further more it is unnecessary as Unicode includes any 
character in ISO-8859-1.  For example, I bet your feed is broken now, as 
it is still saying it's encoded with UTF-8. You will experience similar 
problems with e-mails sent by Drupal for example.

A properly set up drupal site should handle any characters through UTF-8 
and correctly convert everything into it. If you have old content, 
convert it to UTF-8 with iconv before importing. Oh and note that stuff 
like "curly quotes" is actually not ISO-8859-1, it's Windows-1252.


Steven Wittens