-Solved- Latin-8859-1 and UTF-8 conversion drives me crazy!

[MBantz]

Hi all,

can't figure this one out easily....

I have a UTF-8 formatted (according to Kate) document called danish.php.

Inside it has php code with translations written in Latin-8859. The special danish characters are all displayed as ?

It does not matter if the document is Latin-8859 or UTF-8, I just need to be able to see and edit the proper danish characters and not ?.

How on earth do I get by this problem?

TIA,
MBantz

[pinoc]

has your system been set to Danish and/or have you tried already the last note (in red) mentioned here?

[DeBaas]

In Firefox you can choose all kind of character sets, maybe you can use source view.
just 2 cents........

[MBantz]

Thanks a bunch Pinoc! That worked, that is - I can convert the document to Latin-1 and the danish characters display fine. Next thing is to convert them to uft-8 and set the encoding in the php file, should be no problem :-)

Do you have any web-references to this issue - ie. pitfalls in character encoding or just what this 'old-style' means? I'm a nerd for details :-)

again thanks,

cheers,
MBantz

has your system been set to Danish and/or have you tried already the last note (in red) mentioned here?

[pinoc]

Hi MBantz,

unfortunately I have no web reference and there are still some issues which are unclear to me. For example some diacritics are displayed correctly in a gnome-based WM but not in a KDE-konsole. Anyway, utf-8 is the default and should be used as a standard, eventually the 'old compatibility mode' will disappear and utf-8 should do everything fine. Apparently, we are not there yet    But at least it works for you now, and that is a good start... 

regards,
-pinoc

[MBantz]

Thanks again Pinoc,

After changing my KDE to the 'old-style' the diacritics was fine in the documents I needed to edit - but all the diacritics I use in filenames in my system and so was then messed up - so I changed the necessary files (used iconv to change to utf-8) and went back to the 'new-style' (whatever that is :-). The files I changed has kept the UTF-8 encoding and show the diacritics fine as expected,

looked at utf-8 in wikipedia, it's 1-4 bytes long, and can include byte-order-mark and other peculiarities - but no description about any 'old versus new' encoding style - still trying to figure this out,

cheers,
MBantz