• From: Netherlands
  • Registered: 04/28/2009
  • Posts: 80

Topic: Use a ISO 8859-1 as UTF8

I'm using an ubuntu desktop system as LAMP server.
On this Machine Frontaccount is running.

To make my Dutch language work I had to change the default language to ISO-8859-1. (It was UTF8)

Now I was wondering, is it also possible to use a ISO language as an UTF8 Language? I mean, what decides whetere a PO and MO file are ISO or UTF8?

If I can convert my ISO PO to UTF8 PO, i can place it on any system without the hassle of changeing the standard locale....

So what decides whether a PO file is ISO or UTF8?

  • Registered: 12/25/2007
  • Posts: 2,448

Re: Use a ISO 8859-1 as UTF8

This is declared on Install/Update Language page, and put in lang/installed_languages.inc file.

Janusz

  • Registered: 12/25/2007
  • Posts: 2,448

Re: Use a ISO 8859-1 as UTF8

If ISO-8859-1 contains all needed chars you can prefer using it, as UTF-8 report generation is much more memory hungry.
Janusz

  • From: Netherlands
  • Registered: 04/28/2009
  • Posts: 80

Re: Use a ISO 8859-1 as UTF8

I see, my idea was to use UTF8 because that is the standard on ubuntu...
This way we don't have to change anything on the servers of our future clients...

To use ISO-8859-1 we do have to change some settings.

But can you use any PO file UTF8?
I mean, what decides wheter a PO file is UTF or ISO?

  • joe
  • Administrator
  • Offline
  • Registered: 03/15/2007
  • Posts: 5,107

Re: Use a ISO 8859-1 as UTF8

We just installed a Spanish/Argentine language on the demo server (Linux with gettext installed) . The language was set to UTF-8 in the PO file before creating the MO file (Catalog - Settings) (normally it is ok with iso-8859-1). Due to this we installed the language via Setup - install/upgrade languages. Set the  Encoding to UTF-8. Choosed the language in Preferences. Logged out and in again and everything went fine.

Normally you would set the encoding for Spanish to iso-8859-1, but I thought it would be cool to test if it works with UTF-8 and it did on the demo server.

Did you use UTF8 instead of UTF-8. I haven't tested if this could be a problem.

/joe