Hi,
first of all, is there maybe an official developers comment on making utf-8 the default bord encoding?
Making utf-8 the default character set in my point of view should be on the top of the priorities for SMF.
I know there are a lot of issues related to utf-8, but I believe you know how important this is for non-english forums.
I would be glad to help makeing this thing work as expected, but I would also like to know what are the main problems in acchieving this goal?
Some of the things that need to be done, to make this work are:
- change the collation of the database
- "SET NAMES utf8" query after connecting to the database, just don't which mysql version started supporting this? - rewrite string manipulation function
- non english characters take more than 1 byte in a string, up to 4 characters max - change the template to provide correct encoding in the <head> of the html page
Is there maybe something I'am missing, or this is all?
UTF-8 support is currently being worked on.
If you need help beta-testing & stuff, please do contact me, I'm not on the forums often, but I would really like to give something back to the community.
Also, I have more than basic PHP skills, and spent to many hours making web application work in UTF-8, so I believe maybe I can be of some help...
Cheers..