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Using Chinese characters in text fields

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Darren

23 Nov, 2011 03:20 PM

We are experiencing issues trying to create a few pages using Chinese text. In our pages we can insert Chinese characters successfully into WYSIWYG regions but inserting the Chinese text into a text field of a Data Definition or metadata field it converts them to unknown characters.

It properly copies the characters into the text fields but during the Submit it appears to save them incorrectly. When the page returns with a view of it all the Chinese characters are upside down question marks. Editing the page again shows the text fields with upside down question marks (or invalid characters) which leads me to believe they are saving incorrectly. Putting Chinese text into a WYSIWYG editor works perfectly, both in the CMS and on our published page.

I found a couple of posts on this but none of them pertained directly to what we are seeing except for the following post (http://help.hannonhill.com/discussions/bug-reports/82-language-char...) which we verified the config is set in our environment. I also verified that my browser is set to UTF-8 and our database is set to UTF-16. Spanish characters seem to work without issue in both text fields and WYSIWYG.

I am a little stumped here. Has anyone been able to enter Chinese characters into text fields?

Thanks
Darren

1. 1 Posted by Ryan Griffith on 21 Jun, 2012 05:49 PM

   

   Hi Darren,

   I was going over some older discussions and noticed this one is still open. Were you able to identify the cause of the Chinese characters not being converted correctly?

   Please feel free to let us know if you have any other questions.

   Thanks.

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2. 2 Posted by Darren on 21 Jun, 2012 06:19 PM

   

   Hi Ryan,

   No we never did figure it out but it was something specific with text fields in data definitions and metadata sets. All WYSIWYGs work with Chinese characters. I was wondering if it was due to some encoding done by Cascade on text fields that does not occur on WYSIWYGs.

   -Darren

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3. 3 Posted by Ryan Griffith on 21 Jun, 2012 06:31 PM

   

   It may be, I vaguely recall something similar that occurred at the previous institution that I was employed at. I believe this was due to the way the server's encoding was configured.

   I tried adding 年 to a text area on my local 7.0.1 instance and it seemed to encode correctly. Perhaps this could be a configuration issue?

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4. 4 Posted by Ryan Griffith on 13 Jul, 2012 05:09 PM

   

   Hi Darren,

   I wanted to follow up to see if you were able to figure out what was causing this behavior.

   I was not able to reproduce this behavior on my local instance of Cascade 7.0.1 using MySQL (set to UTF8), I was thinking perhaps there may be a configuration somewhere causing this.

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5. 5 Posted by Darren on 16 Jul, 2012 02:16 PM

   

   Hi Ryan,

   As far as we can tell everything is configured correctly. We are able to use Chinese characters in non-text field elements like WYSIWYGs. I wonder if it is possible that it was incidentally fixed in version 7. I can check once we upgrade but right now we do not have that on our radar. Our work around was to use WYSIWYGs for all textual content input. It is not the prettiest to edit the page but it works.

   -Darren

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6. 6 Posted by Ryan Griffith on 16 Jul, 2012 04:37 PM

   

   Darren, glad to hear you found a workaround for the time being. Definitely let us know how things go after the upgrade.

   I am going to go ahead and close this discussion, please feel free to reply or comment to re-open if you have any additional questions or feedback.

   Thanks!

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7. Ryan Griffith closed this discussion on 16 Jul, 2012 04:37 PM.

8. Darren re-opened this discussion on 24 Jun, 2013 01:34 PM

9. 7 Posted by Darren on 24 Jun, 2013 01:34 PM

   

   About a year ago I reported that we were unable to use Chinese characters in text fields in Cascade. We've done several Cascade upgrades since but the issue wasn't corrected. We've been running v7.2 for a couple of months now but made an update to the Oracle database this past week.

   We changed the database character set on our Oracle database from WE8ISO8859P1 to AL32UTF8. Text fields now accept Chinese characters and returns them correctly. Bottom line is that our database was not set to the correct character set. Cascade was fine all along.

   Wanted to share this information in case anyone else was having the same issue.

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10. Support Staff 8 Posted by Tim on 24 Jun, 2013 01:55 PM

    

    Darren,

    We're glad to hear that modifying the character set on your database did the trick. Thanks for sharing the update! Take care.

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11. Tim closed this discussion on 24 Jun, 2013 01:55 PM.