SMF Support > Language Specific Support

It's all Greek to me .... :)

(1/5) > >>

amordad_yar:
Thanks in advance for any help passed my way.  I did try to search a bit before asking but wasn't really sure where to search. Several years ago I built a forum for a Greek friend and she has been maintaining it ever since so I hate to admit that I've let it slip to the back corners of my mind and don't recall all the struggling to get it work originally. It is currently at 1.1.14 though the language files ( specifically the greek-utf8 ) are at 1.1 rc3

Even when first installed, the Greek letters changed to garbage when I would change the site to English so that I could help her configure it. We thought it was no big deal until 2 years later she mentioned to me that searches in the site don't work.  I deduced that it was related to the 'garbage' I saw when changing it back to English but wasn't certain and couldn't figure out what I needed to do to fix that problem.

After all these years and lots of data, she wants to upgrade the site but most importantly, she ( nor I ) want to lose all the data that is there so I truly need to find the correct path now. The database collation is set to utf8_general_ci BUT within the maintenance sectinon of SMF, I am being offered the opportunity to convert the data to utf-8 so I'm guessing that though the language files are utf8 and the collation is set to utf8, I'm still missing one thing.  I did copy the database and entire site and then ran the 'convert to utf8' option but this did not fix the problem.   Where do I go next?

agridoc:
A link would be useful. PM it to me if you don't want it public. Also, please set the user permission to change languages to on.

Please check collation of database SMF tables and text fields inside them.

agridoc:

--- Quote from: amordad_yar on June 30, 2011, 01:06:59 AM ---Even when first installed, the Greek letters changed to garbage when I would change the site to English so that I could help her configure it. We thought it was no big deal until 2 years later she mentioned to me that searches in the site don't work.
--- End quote ---

The installation is probably an ISO-8859-1 English first install. "Garbage" chars are easy cured by changing codepage to Greek in /Themes/default/Languages/index.english.php.

Find

--- Code: ---$txt['lang_character_set'] = 'ISO-8859-1';
--- End code ---

Replace with

--- Code: ---$txt['lang_character_set'] = 'windows-1253';
--- End code ---

English won't be affected, special chars are stored as entities.

Search works with this setup, even for entities, sorting is not correct, a weak point for ISO installations here. If the forum has many messages some indexing may be necessary.

amordad_yar:
Yes... index.english.php was iso9959-1 so I changed that as you instructed - the chars did change to somewhat 'less' garbage though they still not the same as when I am viewing the site in Greek. If that will help the search function though, I'm pleased.

As for the tables and text fields inside the database, you are correct again. They are not UTF but instead latin1_swedish_ci.  I'm going to copy the database and entire site once again before making any more changes but you are more than welcome to look at the site to see what I see - ( www.veganforum.gr [nofollow] ) changing language support has been enabled. All accounts must be approved but I'll see to it that you are asap.   

agridoc:
You had reported in the first message that Greek was UTF-8. I examined the site a bit it's an ISO SMF 1.1x installation with latin1_swedish_ci database tables and text fields.

Unfortunately you have added the Greek UTF-8 language pack and not the Greek (windows-1253) one. So the change in index.english.php has not the desired effect. Changing the codepege to UTF-8 will make Greek show correctly but this is not the right solution. So bring back the codepage in index.english.php to ISO-8859-1.

The forum must be converted to UTF-8. Have a bit of patience to clear a few more things as this is not a "normal" case. You must be able to take database and forum backup and be able to restore a database backup.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page