French Language Issue

[Philibel]

I get this:
d�cembre
instead of:
Décembre
when the customer has it in French version.

Of course the first reaction was to check admin/includes/languages/french.php line 443:

define('_DECEMBER', 'Décembre'); 

But that cannot be the problem as it's with capital D and other instances of é are correct.

Culprit seems to be: admin/includes/javascript/jquery-ui-i18n.min.js but:

Pulling it in from the CDN is actually the preferred approach.

Any suggestions how to fix this?

[swguy]

You want to be sure you're using an appropriate character set that can represent those accents (i.e. *not* the old Windows 1252).

Is your DB_CHARSET value utf8 (or some variant thereof) in includes/configure.php?

Is your CHARSET value utf-8 in includes/languages/YOUR_TEMPLATE/french.php ?

Also: no need to check admin files for storefront issues.

[Philibel]

Is your DB_CHARSET value utf8 (or some variant thereof) in includes/configure.php?

Line #49:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8'); // 'utf8' or 'latin1' are most common 

Is your CHARSET value utf-8 in includes/languages/YOUR_TEMPLATE/french.php ?

Line #44:

define('CHARSET', 'utf-8'); 

I tested it on 4 PC browsers (Opera, Firefox, Edge, Chrome) and on mobile:
French: Ce produit a été ajouté à notre catalogue le mercredi 10 d�cembre 2008. � has to be é like it does show in the rest of the text.
German: Dieser Artikel wurde am Montag 29 M�rz 2021 im Shop aufgenommen. � has to be ä like it does show in "Räucherstäbchen"

<p id="productDateAdded" class="productGeneral centeredContent" style="">
Ce produit a été ajouté à notre catalogue le mercredi 10 d�cembre 2008.</p>

/includes/languages/french/document_general_info.php

Line #12 :

define('TEXT_DATE_ADDED', 'Ce produit a été ajouté à notre catalogue le %s.'); 

It seems like the %s triggers the problem.

[lat9]

Within your /includes/languages/french.php, what is set for the $locales?

[Philibel]

Answer:

  $locales = ['fr_FR', 'fr_FR.utf8', 'fr', 'French']; 

The path to the solution:
Your question brought my attention to the next line in the file:

  @setlocale(LC_TIME, 'fr_FR'); //in french.php
  @setlocale(LC_TIME, $locales); //in german.php 

Step 1
Changing it to $locales in french.php resulted in the date being display in English.
Changing it to fr_FR.utf8 in french.php resulted in fixing é in the months.
Changing it to de_DE.utf8 in german.php resulted in fixing März.

Step 2
Then I started from the presumption that there's an importance in the order $locales is listed.

  @setlocale(LC_TIME, $locales); //in all THE_LANGUAGE.php 

So I placed all utf8-versions first:

  $locales = ['fr_FR.utf8', 'fr_FR', 'fr', 'French']; //in french.php
  $locales = ['de_DE.utf8', 'de_DE', 'de', 'German']; //in german.php 

It looks like this fixes all problems.

Suggestion to/question for core writer members:
In english.php shouldn't:

  $locales = ['en_US', 'en_US.utf8', 'en', 'English_United States.1252']; 

then become:

  $locales = ['en_US.utf8', 'en_US', 'en', 'English_United States.1252']; 

[swguy]

Great catch @lat9. I will add this as a thing to check in the documentation.