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**RuralWeb** · 19-Feb-2007, 05:06 PM

Not much help but I seem to remember doing something on this subject a few years ago - the problem was solved at the server end but I cannot remeber exactly what - sorry

**fergusw** · 19-Feb-2007, 05:49 PM

Have you got the following

Code:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

in the HEAD tag of all your HTML overall layouts?

**felixoconnor** · 20-Feb-2007, 12:52 PM

Ah - Fergus, I have looked for places where my topmost setting of chareset="UTF-8" can be overridden but not found anywhere yet.

I'm pretty sure now that wherever an Actinic site calls on JavaScript to generate a list - like the section selection box on the left hand side, or the search results page, then it converts text using a simple-minded conversion function that does not know about multi byte unicode sequences so it faithfully html-ifies each byte of the two-byte special character!

As for the pounds signs...

i'm dazed and confused...

And so too are the folk at actinic support - judging by their continued silence and lack of any further email responses.

**RuralWeb** · 20-Feb-2007, 02:52 PM

As for the pounds signs...

Thats reminded me as it was the pound signs that I was having problems with - in my case it was nothing to do with Actinic it was the server that was running the wrong character set.

**fergusw** · 20-Feb-2007, 03:18 PM

Setting the META reference in the top of the HTML should tell the server which encoding to utilise for server requests for that page.

Code:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Putting the above in the <HEAD></HEAD> tags on the document should enforce the iso-8859-1 charset over the servers default UTF .

**Jane** · 20-Feb-2007, 04:29 PM

Originally posted by fergusw

Setting the META reference in the top of the HTML should tell the server which encoding to utilise for server requests for that page.

Code:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

Putting the above in the <HEAD></HEAD> tags on the document should enforce the iso-8859-1 charset over the servers default UTF .

Hi there, Hope you dont mind my joining in - I am working with Felix on this. I have had all combinations of the above code in the header, either or both charsets and each time the javascript sections list shows bad characters, as do the search result and the cart pages.

**Bruce** · 22-Feb-2007, 12:24 PM

Jane,

Perhaps the following Knowledge Base article would be of help http://knowledge.actinic.com/acatalo...394.html#a1090

It says:

The problem is that your webserver is using 'Unicode' (UTF) as the default character set, but it should be using ISO. You need to ask your web host to edit the web server config file for your Apache server and change:

AddDefaultCharset UTF8

to

AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1

Kind regards,

**felixoconnor** · 22-Feb-2007, 04:04 PM

Definitive Answer

Thanks to All,

What some folk failed to notice was that in my original query I stated I have to use UTF-8 encoding as my products can have some very strange accented characters in their names. Even if this were not the case though, there are extremly good arguments in general for software to fully support UTF-8 as it is a genius form of encoding - it encompasses all the (regular) ascii characters, and collates them as expected, and it allows for (almost) all the unicode characters - all without leaving any nulls in text strings - brilliant! and all composed on the back of a napkin (just like tcp, http and all the best ideas).

IDEALLY, what I needed to do was, in the ActinicCatalogue database, currency table, SCURRENCY field for Pounds Sterling replace the ISO-8859-1 character 163, which displays as the pound sterling symbol in all single byte (ascii) encodings, with a completly generic html entity (& pound

or (& # 163

but niether of these were possible as the field width was too short! (don't mention extending it - price display is then broken completly).

So - a non ideal solution (cos it ain't generic) was to get the actual UTF-8 2 byte sequence 194, 163 into this field... To do this I had to grab the ascii characters at 194 and 163 from the windows font selector and drop them into the DB field using Access, and believe it or not it has worked!

**pixelhaus** · 06-Nov-2007, 10:15 AM

I have a similar problem. Ł signs are not being displayed in some places, but in others. If a Ł symbol is typed in, it appears. If it is part of a product price, you get ?. BUT, if you add a product to the basket, it appears correctly. What's going on there then ? The site is at www.heraldicneedlepoint.com

**gabrielcrowe** · 06-Nov-2007, 10:42 AM

welcome to my world.

Actinic does not support utf-8. at all, this is from the horses mouth.

your only option is to use html encoded blocks, with the html equiv in your descriptions.

HTML Code:

!!<&pound;>!!

Actninic NEEDS to fix ite encodings to ALL unicode, if it wants to survive the changing web.

**gabrielcrowe** · 06-Nov-2007, 11:11 AM

if its any help, or you think you can impliment it, then make your pages execute as php and put this in the header:

PHP Code:


<? header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); ?>

**pixelhaus** · 06-Nov-2007, 11:27 AM

I've had a good old rootle around on the server, and the default character set is ISO8859-1. Now here is the really odd thing. I have another older server on which all my other Actinic sites are and they display correctly, the default charset is UTF8. I changed the default charset on the newer server to UTF8 with no benefit.

This is in the head of my templates. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

**pixelhaus** · 06-Nov-2007, 12:31 PM

Ta-daa

Well I fixed it! In the config file the default charset was iso 8859-1 but in another file called charset (i think there was a clue in the name) it was set to UTF 8, so I altered that and, blow me down, it worked.

**fainster** · 07-Nov-2007, 12:35 PM

We had the same problem, and we were also told to change the char set on the server, we checked with our host and we were on the correct settings with, so we went back to Actinic and were given this reply:

Altering Special Character Encoding

1) Switch to the 'Design' tab and click on any price shown in the 'Page Preview' pane.

2) This should highlight a variable (written in light blue and underlined) in the 'Layout Code' pane called 'TaxInclusivePrice'.

3) Double-click this variable to open the variable editor.

4) On the row called 'Encoding' click in the white box then select 'HTML' from the drop-down box.

5) Click 'OK'. You should see another variable called 'TaxInclusivePriceAlt' which will need the same setting altered.

Again, you will need to wait until the site has been uploaded for these changes to appear.

This solved the problem for us.
__________________
Graham & Claire Fain

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Pound (Ł) sign problems with UTF-8

Pound (Ł) sign problems with UTF-8

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