Notification Email Issues in German -Issues with Umlaute-

Hi, I am using the zen-cart in English and German. When a customer orders, he receives an order confirmation email & subsequent updates on the order process.

When using German, the subject line shows some strange letters as placeholders for the German umlaut, i.e. instead of 'ü' (ue) it writes %&%@,:; or something like this in the middle of a word.

How and where can I change/correct this?

I've checked all the files in language 'german' and also all the other files in the cart system. Still, I have not managed to remedy this.

Thanks for your urgent help.

No help, no ideas? :(

I don't have any authoritative knowledge on this, but from what I've seen, it would be a character set issue. You would need to change either your database or operating system or something else to use a more comprehensive character set (e.g. latin -> utf-8) which knows how to display German characters.
You might try googling that, as it's not just a Zen Cart issue.

I might have an alternative solution for this:

http://osdir.com/ml/serendipity.cvs/2003-06/msg00051.html

$str = str_replace("Ü", "UE", $str);
$str = str_replace("ü", "ue", $str);

Meaning; you could replace these characters from your definition language name. Then, it should show the results correctly. :wink2:

For anyone else that is looking for this fix ... here's what I did:

I replaced this code

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

With this code in my includes/languages/german.php file

// charset for web pages and emails
define('CHARSET', 'iso-8859-1');

Assuming you still have problems after changing your charset into iso-8859-1, put following code into line 46 of
includes/ languages/german.php.

Notes: 1. Set back your charset to utf-8.
2. Be sure to use your override language file.
3. As long as everything works fine with the iso-8859- leave it like it is.

/**
 * This is an Unicode aware replacement for str_word_count()
 * $charlist has to be ascii or utf-8
 * does not use locale information
 * public domain
  */
function utf8_str_word_count($string,$format=0,$charlist='') {
    $array = preg_split("/[^'\-A-Za-z".$charlist."]+/u",$string,-1,PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
    switch ($format) {
    case 0:
        return(count($array));
    case 1:
        return($array);
    case 2:
        $pos = 0;
        foreach ($array as $value) {
        $pos = utf8_strpos($string,$value,$pos);
        $posarray[$pos] = $value;
        $pos += utf8_strlen($value);
        }
        return($posarray);
    }
}  
 

carilivia:

For anyone else that is looking for this fix ... here's what I did:

I replaced this code

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

With this code in my includes/languages/german.php file

// charset for web pages and emails
define('CHARSET', 'iso-8859-1');

I did the above and everything what coming from the database show ok but all the php pages show like this:

Ihre Bestellung wird an die links angezeigte Anschrift geliefert. Sie k�nnen die Lieferanschrift �ndern, wenn Sie auf den Button Adresse �ndern klicken.

Shipping Method:
Bitte w�hlen Sie die Versandart f�r Ihre Bestellung.

Hope somebody can help because i already stuck with it for a few days

Thanx
Andre

I changed it back to

define('CHARSET', 'iso-8859-1');

Now my php pages are good but everything out of the database is wrong

Like this Categorie: Schlüsselanhänger shows Schlüsselanhänger

??????????