Multiple Encoding forums in UTF-8 (with specific chars in French, German, Russian etc.)

I've moved this message from another thread:

"if I leave the default english interface, I am still able to post cyrillic messages and they are dispayed correctly, but ones posted by other users who set up their interface to russian are crappy re-converted. It still is possible make it to display correctly by selecting 'View' encoding as 'Windows-1251' manually, but again, it will display specific german, french, etc. letters incorrectly in this case, and worse, for every other site too. Assigning $l_meta empty string, as suggested in manual, does not help in fact.
So, I hope there must be another fix or solution that helps for sure, 'coz I see a variety of forums over there, which manage this situation perfectly."

So,

if you want to set-up multiple encoding forums, it's the most better idea to start them in UTF-8 mode. For this:

1) All language packs must be converted to UTF-8 (not a completely easy job, I know, but worth it). So each language pack should be saved in UTF-8 encoding. And, it should contain charset=utf-8 under $l_meta variable.

2) Allow only latin symbols in $userRegName setting of setup_options.php (it comes that way by default). Of course, it's possible also specify some symbols in UTF-8 here, but I doubt it's worth it, since you will need to change a lot of fields in database later.

3) topic_title field of minibbtopics_table in database must be specified as 'text' type (by default, comes as varchar(255)). SQL command for this:

ALTER TABLE `minibb_topics` CHANGE `topic_title` `topic_title` TEXT;

4) generic bb_func_txt.php file of miniBB package should be used as from the latest version 2.0.3. It has some fixes regarding symbols encoded in UTF-8.

I hope that's all for regular forums...

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Multiple Encoding forums in UTF-8 (with specific chars in French, German, Russian etc.)

	Paul CEO	#1 \| Posted: 31 Oct 2006 05:08 \| Edited by: Paul
I've moved this message from another thread: "if I leave the default english interface, I am still able to post cyrillic messages and they are dispayed correctly, but ones posted by other users who set up their interface to russian are crappy re-converted. It still is possible make it to display correctly by selecting 'View' encoding as 'Windows-1251' manually, but again, it will display specific german, french, etc. letters incorrectly in this case, and worse, for every other site too. Assigning $l_meta empty string, as suggested in manual, does not help in fact. So, I hope there must be another fix or solution that helps for sure, 'coz I see a variety of forums over there, which manage this situation perfectly." So, if you want to set-up multiple encoding forums, it's the most better idea to start them in UTF-8 mode. For this: 1) All language packs must be converted to UTF-8 (not a completely easy job, I know, but worth it). So each language pack should be saved in UTF-8 encoding. And, it should contain charset=utf-8 under $l_meta variable. 2) Allow only latin symbols in $userRegName setting of setup_options.php (it comes that way by default). Of course, it's possible also specify some symbols in UTF-8 here, but I doubt it's worth it, since you will need to change a lot of fields in database later. 3) topic_title field of minibbtopics_table in database must be specified as 'text' type (by default, comes as varchar(255)). SQL command for this: ALTER TABLE `minibb_topics` CHANGE `topic_title` `topic_title` TEXT; 4) generic bb_func_txt.php file of miniBB package should be used as from the latest version 2.0.3. It has some fixes regarding symbols encoded in UTF-8. I hope that's all for regular forums...