Broken umlauts and special characters in MAKETEXT

Hello,

I have a Foswiki 1.0.5 with german content and I have problems with the character encoding of %<nop>MAKETEXT{}%.

The umlauts and special characters works in the normal text.

If I change the {Site}{Locale} in configure to "de_AT.ISO-8859-15" like described below the form, I get a warning:

Warning: Unable to set locale to 'de_AT.ISO-8859-15'. The actual locale is 'C' - please test your locale settings. This warning can be ignored if you are not planning to use locales (e.g. your site uses English only) - or you can set {Site}{Locale} to 'C', which should always work.

But this doesn't affect the problem with MAKETEXT at all.

If MAKETEXT translates english content to german it's no problem, but if I give MAKETEXT content with umlauts and special characters like § ² ³ ß µ € it can't render.

Did MAKETEXT use another character encoding. Or is it, that the browser translate the normal content, but not the content of Macros.

Could this be a bug or a configuration failure ?

Many thanks in advance.

-- StephaniePlatz - 10 Jun 2009

As I understand it, MAKETEXT always takes text in English and renders it in the target language, though that may just be my narrow world view.

Text in topics is always stored in the character set active on the site when the topic was edited. So if you edit a topic with UTF8 enabled, and then change the site character set to iso-8859-1, you could end up with broken text. Also, make sure your {Site}{CharSet} is consistent with your locale, or unpredictable things may happen.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 10 Jun 2009

Also make sure, that you have de_AT.ISO-8859-15 installed on your system. locale -a will tell you.

If you want to add your custom strings to foswikis po files, make sure to leave the encoding of the po files untouched. They are utf8 encoded.

-- OliverKrueger - 24 Jun 2009