[ic] Extended ASCII problem - non-English characters

ICdev interchange.mail at virgin.net
Thu Jul 1 22:55:23 EDT 2004


Hello,

I have a problem with extended ASCII characters being displayed incorrectly in 
various places within Interchange. For example, foreign addresses with 
non-English characters (German, Swedish and so on) substitute 'gibberish' 
characters for the correct ones, so we have to contact the customer to get 
them to re-send their address by e-mail. :-(

The gibberish characters are stored in the database (MySQL), and are sent in 
the e-mail receipts/reports. The characters are also displayed incorrectly in 
the Admin interface.

Examples (may not turn out right on some systems!):

MySQL, orders/, e-mail: Nürnberg
Admin: Nürnberg

MySQL: VäSTERGöTLAND
orders/, e-mail: västergötland
Admin: VäSTERGöTLAND

Occasionally, the foreign characters are stored correctly, and sent in e-mails 
correctly, but are still not displayed properly in Admin:

MySQL, orders/, e-mail: Störåsen (correct)
Admin: Störåsen

To confuse things further, the e-mail report received sometimes varies from 
the report in the 'orders' directory, and from what is in the database. For 
example, in the e-mail, there may be two gibberish characters, one directly 
after the other on an address line, yet the corresponding file in orders/ 
only has one character in that same place:

MySQL, orders/ : HaÃfurter (variation 1)
e-mail: Haßfurter (variation 2)
Admin: Haßfurter (variation 3)

There is also a problem with the British pound symbol (£) in order report 
e-mails. The e-mail received from etc/mail_receipt is fine, but the one from 
etc/report prepends weird 'A' characters to the pound symbol. Again, this 
varies from what is in the orders directory. In the e-mail, there are two 
weird 'A's separated by a comma before the pound symbol for item prices:

 Ã,£0.00

...but in the corresponding orders/ file, there is no comma. The 'Subtotal', 
'Sales Tax', 'Shipping', 'Order Total' lines, etc. also have one weird 'A' 
character prepended to the pound symbol:

£0.00

I take it this is happening because the last 128 characters of 8-bit ASCII 
vary between computers and operating systems (and even between software on 
the same machine). Has anyone else experienced this problem, and does anyone 
have any idea how to fix it?

Running IC 4.8.7 on RedHat 7.3.

Thanks in advance for any help.



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