We are hosting a contest on our site that is open to the international community. A small percentage of our users are Japanese and have asked to be able to post comments on our site using Hiragana.
Currently, their comments show up as strings of ?????? question marks.
We are using a Win 2008 server running IIS 7 and Coldfusion 10. The DB where the comments are stored (and also appear as ?????? question marks) is SQL Server 2012.
The site is currently using the UTF-8 charset:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
Not sure where I need to make changes. DB? CF? Windows? IIS? Website code? Any ideas?
I've found other similar questions, but they usually have to do specifically with WordPress, Joomla, or site's that are entirely Japanese.
Thanks!
You might claim you are using UTF-8, but are you really? If your database, strings (the programming language might need to be told to handle strings as UTF-8), and actual output encoding aren't UTF-8, then you won't get proper results.
Then here is the font issue; many characters are not included in every font and thus don't work on a lot of computers.
Also try setting headers like this as actual headers.
collation has nothing to do with this neither do fonts (your unicode data is getting garbaged going into the db). so...
you should be talking to your db via one of the JDBC drivers not ODBC.
your db should be unicode capable & you must use unicode capable datatypes to hold the data (eg, for sql server use the "N" datatypes like Nvarchar, etc).
i assume you're using cfqueryparam (its a user facing form after all), so you need to enable the "Enable High ASCII characters"... option for that datasource in cfadmin (under the advanced menu).
Related
I feel I'm a bit in over my head on this one. I have developed an ASP.Net MVC website for a friend that allows them to paste in Hebrew words and it does some conversion/translation. I am using MySQL as a data backend with ASP.Net MVC 5.
The website is fairly simple. The database consists of two tables which store letters, and translations. I am using MySQL EF6 for data access layer. There are basically three screens on the website, one for managing each table, and one for doing the translations.
When I run it in my development environment (VS 2017/Windows 10), everything works as expected. I can edit data using the Hebrew Unicode characters and they save properly to the database. Here is an example:
When I click Save, I expect those values to be saved to the database, and they work fine. However, I have recently converted the website to run on a Mono/Ubuntu environment for hosting. I got the environment setup using mod_mono and Apache2. Everything is working perfectly, except when I save a page like this, the Hebrew character א gets converted into a question mark (?):
Here's what I've determined so far.
I know Apache/MySQL is setup properly to handle these values, because the data displays fine. It only gets messed up when I save it.
I am also running PhpMyAdmin on the same server, and when I modify that same row through the table editor, it does not mess up the encoding.
I've tried adding the Default Encoding utf-8 to the Apache configuration with no luck.
I've tried adding globalization with default encodings of utf-8 to web.config and it didn't help.
How do I troubleshoot where the value is getting messed up? Is there a simple solution I need to apply to fix this?
Thanks!
The bytes to be stored are not encoded as utf8/utf8mb4. Fix this.
The column in the database is CHARACTER SET utf8 (or utf8mb4). Fix this.
Also, check that the connection during reading is UTF-8.
HTML forms should start like <form accept-charset="UTF-8">.
For more discussion, see Trouble with utf8 characters; what I see is not what I stored
If that is not enough to solve your problem, find the HEX, as discussed in "Test the data" in that link; then ask for more help.
I have an old site where visitors can add their comments. Until now it always worked well, it doesn't have many visitors (it's for a niche audience). It was built in classic ASP and it's using MySQL (now 5.6). It's running on IIS 8.5 and it connects to the DB without DSN.
Whenever someone adds emoji characters to their posts it'll make the IIS service go into some kind of loop using more than 60% of the CPU and never stops.
I do not want to filter these characters out, I think they fit in well with the site's premise, however I did not foresee this issue. When I first set up MySQL I used UTF-16 to make sure my users could write in any language, and I never had issues until now. There are messages in what looks like Japanese and Korean, and I only figured out it was an issue with Emojis when a user told me what he was doing when the site crashed on him.
All the site's pages/files are saved in Unicode and for all of them the charset is set as "utf-8".
The database's collation is utf16_unicode_ci and so are the tables'.
I can insert Emojis into the tables directly from command line or via HeidiSQL, however....
The server is sending the Emojis as question marks (?).
Here's my connection string:
Driver={MySQL ODBC 5.3 Unicode
Driver};Server=...;User=******;Password=******;Option=3;charset=utf16;
Use CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 end-to-end in MySQL.
I'm using Access with Slavic characters in VBA on many computers without any problems
but on my home computer, that I rarely use, I get problems as VBA (Accesss?) doesn't recognize the encoding.
I get an error at login as the code tries to add the log in entry to datumčas field . I get the error that datum'as is not recognized. The problem is obvious I guess, tables are keeping Central European encoding but the VBA reads it as Western encoding, something like that.
Is there a way to correct this? bypass it? My home computer Windows language is set to Slovenian with Slovenian and English installed, but I guess those settings are the same on other computers.
I changed the Windows system locale to Slovenian and now it works well. I guess I was fancy at setup and went with the US locale.
I set up a web project on a web server with apparently wrong encoding. But somehow (I really don't know why), we figured how we had to deal with it and the encoding worked for us.
But now we moved the data to a new server with a correctly set up UTF8 database and surprise, the encoding is wrong.
How can we "correct" the data, is there any best practice?
Example
old server: http://www.orat.io/stmt/200
new server: http://www.firefile.net/stmt/200
Thanks a lot!
This actually happens in practice - I've seen it sometimes :-) What usually happens:
database is in utf-8
input/output is in encoding1 - say it is iso-8859-2 (i.e. the meta-charset in HTML)
but, because the previous admin didn't know how to properly set the database connection encoding (this is the charset which is specified using set names SQL command), the database connection is configured as if the input/output is in different encoding2 - say iso-8859-1 - default on many linux systems.
To get the correct data out of the database, you must access it in the same erroneous way as you did before - e.g. for the example above, set iso-8859-1 encoding but in fact get the iso-8859-2. Everything "works" until someone starts to access the database correctly.
You have not provided enough detail about what is encoding1/encoding2 in your case and you probably don't know it. So, either look at the old setup or try to figure out by trial and error.
The easiest way to re-code your database is probably to do mysqldump in encoding2, then claim it's encoding1 (just put the set names encoding1 at the beginning of sql file) and import the database into an empty one by source-ing the sql file. All database fields of course stay in utf-8 all the time.
Be careful and use PHPMyAdmin as an independent tool to see the "real" state of the database. :-) Good luck with this rebus.
I'm using IIS7 on my Windows7 operating system to run my project written in ASP3.0 language with use of Ms Access 2010 database.
Most of the data that I saved on MsAccess DB is in Arabic language. If you have the font you must see example: سلام
Everything was right and I was using my program running on IIS7. But one day, I decided to run this program on another computer too. So, I installed IIS7 and MsAccess2010 on Windows7 on that computer and I ran this program on second computer, I saw that Arabic texts which stored in database are shown like "???????" (Question mark) on browser. But stored data on MsAccess file are not ?????.
I tried to fix this problem by reading different articles, But I cant overcome.
Any one can help?
Both the database and your page need to use UTF-8 encoding in order for this to work.
This should be in your <HEAD>:
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
If the data was stored as Windows-1251 encoding, as is common when using MS Word Etc., then you're in for a bit of pain. Data will still come out with the wrong encoding.
If this is what you see, you may need to re-load those docs into Word 2007/2010 and re-save them as UTF-8, then re-insert them into the MS Access.