[moregroupware-devel] discussion about character encodings

[Franky <lie...@pa...>]

Hi all,

lately there have been some character encoding problems with UTF-8 
languages, but also Korean, Russian, etc ...
Therefore I have a suggestion:

- convert all language files to UTF-8
- use only UTF-8 as the character set in the generated html files
- change all calls to htmlspecialchars and htmlentities so they include 
the third parameter (charset) and set that to UTF-8

(and now the discusion issues):
- use the mb_* php functions (see 
http://be.php.net/manual/en/ref.mbstring.php)
  or: use the mbstring.func_overload parameter in php.ini (less code 
changes required)
- set the internal encoding to UTF-8 (mbstring.internal_encoding)
- set transparent encoding for incoming html requests 
(mbstring.encoding_translation) or use |mb_convert_encoding|
- use mb_http_output()* *to force html output to UTF-8 characterset
==> for these to work, the mbstring function calls need to be 
implemented of course, otherwise we can do something like tikiwiki 
(define own mb_* functions, but they only created one, and it's 
difficult to create these functions)
==> using iconv maybe also a possibility

Of course more subtle changes are required for webmail, where you need 
to define the character encoding in html mails, but I hope that will be 
easier to do ... if needed.

In all of this, I could use the assistance from somebody with a little 
more knowledge in charactersets, so he/she can confirm that what I'm 
saying is correct or not ...

Franky