Garbage special characters

[PeterThake]

I couldn't see any threads quite like this, so here goes.

I get a lot of international orders from countries like Russia and Turkey which use special characters in their names and addresses. Sometimes the customer name and address arrives in actinic with garbage in place of special characters. For example, the İ character is imported as a character code (if I type the code here it correctly converts the code to the "İ")

Any idea if this is an Actinic config issue or server config? Or something else?

Thanks!

[grantglendinnin]

Have you tried changing the Windows settings in Control Panel - Regional and Language Settings? This is assuming Actinic takes the character set from the Windows registry and not from within its own library.

[PeterThake]

Windows Regional Settings

Thanks Grant. The only bit I can see in the Windows Regional Settings is the Code Page Conversion settings. There are loads of these! I am not sure which to tick, and am a bit reluctant to start changing these settings.

Can anyone from Actinic help?

[TraceyG]

Hi,

I'm afraid that Actinic cannot deal with UNICODE characters and I'm told that it would not be an easy change to the software. No workaround, sorry.

[PeterThake]

Limitation on international sales?

This is getting bloody annoying! I have an international order and yet again I cannot read the address. Actinic cannot parse the special characters. Ironically, this forum can.

The line of the address is "＃１０６-３-４-４" which I can read here but in Actinic it is a load of ampersands and codes. (I cannot even paste it in here without it being parsed)

Since this cannot be fixed (thanks for the reply TraceyG) then isn't it fair to say that Actinic is not an international ecommerce platform? So do sellers restrict their sales to countries which use standard characters?

This cannot only be an issue for me? This limitation must impact other sellers - what are your work-arounds?

[Mike Hughes]

I'm afraid that Actinic cannot deal with UNICODE characters and I'm told that it would not be an easy change to the software. No workaround, sorry.

That doesn't sound quite right to me. Why isn't it possible to format the characters with javascript before accepting them in the checkout inputs ?

Mike

Edit: I can't find many sources of code for this. http://refactormycode.com/codes/93-unicode-converter might be a good strating point for anyone looking to do this.

PS. Can you copy and paste the entered text into an external unicode convertor and then copy back the correct text?

[PeterThake]

Hi Mike,

Many thanks for the suggestions. Yes I can copy it into a converter, but having to do this several times a day is a real pain. At the moment I am using this forum as a converter! For example, my latest customer is not called Bed[string of special characters] but is in fact: Bednář

I wish I had known that Actinic is not an international ecommerce sales solution. I would rather not have to be copying and pasting like this.

Can anyone tell me if this has been fixed in the latest version (V9)?

[NRasool]

Peter, this will not be fixed in v9, it would need a whole restructures of the main app in the C++ coding and trust me, its not easy to fix, so it will not appear in any v9 patches

What Mike has posted is a good link, however if you want japanese/arabic/russian characters in the Actinic application, then it is simply not possible.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Kind Regards

[meden]

I wish I had known that Actinic is not an international ecommerce sales solution. I would rather not have to be copying and pasting like this.

To be fair Peter when something is described as international doesn't automatically imply that it is capable of dealing with every language variation - an international company for instance does not necessarily trade in every country in the world, just in the ones it is set up to do business in..but I do think Actinic should address the unicode issues sooner rather than later