Why use ISO-8859-1?

  • LiveJournal has been on UTF-8 as long as I started using that service in 2 years ago and don’t understand why WP doesn’t do the same. The main reason LJ is on UTF-8 is to support bloggers who want to blog in multiple languages.
    In LJ, a blogger can write an entry that’s half in japanese and half in english go back in and edit — when they wrote in じゃね they go back in to edit じゃね. But in WP, a blogger can’t. When they go back in to edit their entries, they see じゃね. It’s not user friendly.
    And besides, any XML page (and that includes XHTML) will be parsed as utf-8 or utf-16 (though, when I code my pages, I still add redundantly add utf-8 into the meta tag for older browsers that don’t recognize xml/xhtml). And unicode was chosen to make internalization/localization easier. Why override a good thing with the more limiting iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-15?
    For now, I’ve gone through the source code of the 2/14 nightly build and replaced every instance of iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-15 with UTF-8 and this seems to make the blog handle japanese more like LJ would. But, shouldn’t unicode support come out of the box?
    (Oh, and I don’t mean to sound negative, but I love the work you’ve been doing so far. As soon as multiple categories is supported and WP 1.1 is released, I hope to switch from Automated Archive. Despite this one minor nitpick, WP is far superior to AA in many many ways. Congrats on working on a very fine piece of software.)

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • In wp-config.php, add this line:
    $admin_area_charset = ‘utf-8’;
    This should give you at least the admin side in utf-8.
    Most other occurences of ‘iso-8859-1’ are in install/upgrade/import files that do not need utf-8. This is being worked on as I type this. ??

    Oi, I’m just done adding support for a user-configurable charset. It’s in CVS now, the next nightly should have it.
    In 1.1 you shall be able to change your charset in WordPress’s General Options area.
    There are still instances of iso-8859-1, but as I said above they are in places where you do not type anything so it would be of very little significance to convert them to using $blog_charset.
    If you’re running WordPress CVS, make sure you run this query in phpMyAdmin or in whatever way you use to run MySQL queries:
    INSERT INTO wp_options VALUES (93, 1, 'blog_charset', 'Y', 3, 'utf-8', 20, 8, 'your blog\'s charset (here\'s a list of possible charsets)', 8);
    (Replace ‘wp_options’ with your options’ table name, if it’s not ‘wp_options’.)

    Errrr, or just run upgrade.php and it will do that for you. ??

    Thread Starter cra

    (@cra)

    Oh cool! Thanks. ??

    As an Amurrican, it’s my firm policy to ignore all them funky letters with flyspecks around them, but I got the impression from PHPWiki’s page talking about making the transition to UTF-8 that MySQL 3.x doesn’t play well with UTF-8 (and my experience with a quick test made that seem right: I pasted good UTF-8 in, and got multiple single-byte characters back). Am I wrong, or is this building in a MySQL 4.x dependency?

    This post has been the most helpful for me as I wanted to post in french (accented language) AND in chinese.
    I had no difficult issues with B2 (which I liked very much because, technicallywise, it is simple and elegant), but when I switched to WordPress was a little bit more tricky
    Even if i took me 2 days to find the right post, it settled the pb – I had to use the keyword “language” instead of “chinese”.
    Plse allow me to sum it up even if it is redundant:
    1-in index.php, replace the language meta by :
    <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
    2- In wp-config.php, add this line:
    $admin_area_charset = ‘utf-8’;
    I had to do both
    It should do the trick
    I am happy to notice that the pb of non english languages won’t be left unsolved in the next version as i saw that more people from all over the world begin to use WordPress
    Well thks

    What type of characters used in iso-8859-1 encoding

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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