How to make UMLAUTS work with ZenCart?

[kairen]

Until last friday they showed up normally, cause the site was on my computer. Now I put the stuff on a server and each ä is À~ or so. So it thought installing the utf-8 files might help. Well after installing those all ä, ö, Ä, Ö, and å, Å have become unreadable on my localhost version as well. haven't uploaded utf-8 stuff on server to see if paradoxically they would now show up the right way there.

Is there any way to enforce UTF8?

Would changing these lines in my language.php:s help (?) f.i.:

finnish.php:

@setlocale(LC_ALL, 'fi_FI.ISO_8859-15' , 'fi_FI' , 'Finnish');

swedish.php:

setlocale(LC_TIME, 'sv_SE.ISO_8859-1');

english.php:

setlocale(LC_TIME, 'en_US.ISO_8859-1');

AND how about the tables in the mysql? I installed the utf8 pack and it now added the zc_install/sql/ folder with a mysql_zencart.sql file. Could it be I just need to update my tables with this, and HOW to do that, since the sql update in admin doesn't recommend using the direct method...

and nothing happens automatically though it's in the zc_install directory as the admin sql update suggests

[kairen]

Anywoot, I finally just used PHPmyAdmin to export the DB as an sql file, then replaced all umlauts in a text editor to html character codes, since I couldn't get it to work... then dropped tables and imported again...with success.

THIS WORKED

The utf8 update made my ADMIN languages finnish and Swedish show every umlaut as a flipped square with a question mark inside. Still, the pages now show the way I want them to.

[swguy]

I love umlauts. In fact, I think Zen Cart itself should be spelled with umlauts to strike fear in the hearts of lesser carts.

[kairen]

I got bored looking at squared question marks (sideboxes on=päällä/off=ei päällä in finnish) so I found myself a solution. Don't know if it will cause any problems but it shouldn't.

I took my admin/includes/languages/ folder into an extended replace operation under Max's HTML Beauty++ and changed all Umlauts to their equivalent in html:

ä=ä
ö=ö
Ä=Ä
Ö=Ö

Just remember to put case sensitive on and include subfolders. And voilà, the squares are umlauts again and admin-section looks right again.

Ofc, I will have to repeat the export/import procedure to my sql base always after adding new products with descriptions or names containing umlauts.

[moullas]

i think in order for umlauts to show correctly all the temlates (including the Admin ones) should be converted to UTF-8 if you put the UTF support on the card.

If you have a finnish translation that is NOT UTF8 then that's why you are having problems

[pasi]

the Finnish language files are encoded as ISO 8859-15 and if you use UTF-8 then you get errors.

I selected 8859-15 because setting it to UTF-8 messed many peoples sites because database encoding wasn't UTF-8

Sometimes the server forces UTF-8 regardles of the locale settings in HTML

When I updated my linux box and installed apache it made a mess of my zencart test sites ... config had this:

# Read the documentation before enabling AddDefaultCharset.
# In general, it is only a good idea if you know that all your files
# have this encoding. It will override any encoding given in the files
# in meta http-equiv or xml encoding tags.

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

After commenting it out (or changing to the appropriate encoding) the problem went away

[nilsen]

Hi there,
I have a german-english website and also have a problem with the umlauts, they all show as suqare question marks.
I'm rather new to zen cart and would really appriciate your help if you could explain, in very simple steps what you have done to change this.
the umlauts aer showing well in the admin but not in the shop. the funny thing is that if i write in the english side an umlaut, it shows up perfect!
I've also noticed that if I put in ä instead of ä, it shows fine, but I want mz client to be able to change the text without changing all the umlauts, is it possible?
by the way, I'm using 1.38.
Thanks a lot!

[clueless_in_berlin]

I don´t understand the solutions that are written in this thread but I need help.

I have installed the german language pack and it is working properly except that the umlaut letter that I enter through admin (eg. adding new products) do not display properly. The umlaut letters that came with the language pack (eg. sidebox headings) display properly.

I checked the german.php files in admin/includes/languages/custom
and includes/languages/custom for the utf-8 thing and they look o.k. (eg. below)

// charset for web pages and emails
define('CHARSET', 'utf-8');

Could someone provide me with a solution?

[scottmcclean]

Hi I have a similar problem with the German language - did you ever find a solution to this?

regards
Scott

[clueless_in_berlin]

Hi Scott,

sorry for the delayed response. I am in the process of solving this problem for me.

I will let you know when I have it fully figured out.

In the mean time, can you tell me: Are you working from a german computer in Germany like me? I don´t know for sure if it makes a difference but I suspect that some of my many convoluted problems are due to this.

Josh