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BillG
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Apr 14, 2008, 7:10 PM
Post #1 of 6
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Problem with "special" characters HELP!!!
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I've been searching through posts on this forum for hours & I can't seem to find a good solution to this serious issue.
My present website is a mixture of Article Manager news articles, and other articles generated by my content management system. There are some special characters with a Unicode of greater than 0x7F - superscript "1", the copyright symbol, etc. From Windows, I simply used Character Map to insert any character I want.
All characters viewed flawlessly with Article Manager 1. But when I upgraded to AM2 and with IE6 viewed existing articles in the AM2 EDITOR view, special characters are all viewed in the editor as question-marks "?". I didn't do the conversion during the install because I didn't completely understand the reason for it. Shame on me...
Now, if I insert a special character in the AM2 editor view from Windows Character Map, it views fine in the editor, but in the published AM2 article it's prefixed by a capital "A" with a dot over it!
The present charset for the website has been
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252">
The source for the AM2 editor shows that the AM admin interface has a charset=UTF-8.
When I tried changing the charset for the website from windows-1252 to UTF-8 as mentioned elsewhere on this forum, new AM2 articles with special characters displayed properly, but all the other special characters in the rest of the website display as boxes, plus, the AM1 characters are messed up as well.
First, can someone from Interactive Tools give me a damn good technical explanation about WHY this is happening?
Second, how do I fix this?
(This post was edited by BillG on Apr 14, 2008, 11:31 PM)
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MikeB
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/ Moderator
Apr 15, 2008, 9:53 AM
Post #2 of 6
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Re: [BillG] Problem with "special" characters HELP!!!
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Hi Bill,
Thanks for posting!
The issue that you've mentioned here is related to the character set of the articles that were imported from Article Manager 1 and this is the purpose of the data conversion script as part of the upgrade. Because Article Manager 2 does store it's characters as UTF-8 the change you've made to your "meta" tag in the template files is correct and this is why the new articles are now showing up properly.
At this point, I'm curious how many new articles you've added since upgrading to Article Manager 2. Either way we'll need to run that conversion script and the only drawback in this case is that your newly added articles (which are already in the correct character format) will then be changed. To fix this there are a couple of options:
1. If you haven't added many articles since upgrading, you can either remove them or just run the conversion script and go back and manually tweak those few new articles (which would only really be feasible if you haven't added too many articles).
2. If you'd prefer, you could get in touch with our Priority Consulting team (consulting@interactivetools.com) and they can work on setting up the conversion script so it will only run through the older articles and won't modify any articles you've added since the update.
I hope this helps Bill! 
Cheers,
Mike Briggs - Product Specialist
support@interactivetools.com
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BillG
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Apr 15, 2008, 10:14 AM
Post #3 of 6
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Re: [MikeB] Problem with "special" characters HELP!!!
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Well, I've only created one article that has special characters since the upgrade, so using the conversion script isn't a big deal. What IS a big deal is that I've got a backlog of articles that I haven't entered until I can figure this out.
I've been reading about this all night. First, can I assume that there is no charset that will give me both worlds?
Second, what is the reason for now storing articles as UTF-8?
I need to understand the implications of this, because it will have a ripple effect, not just on the website in question, but also in how I standardize across all my websites. Is UTF-8 really "the way to go" for new pages on the web, and WHY?
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MikeB
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Apr 15, 2008, 1:30 PM
Post #4 of 6
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Re: [BillG] Problem with "special" characters HELP!!!
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Hi Bill,
Thanks for the update!
There isn't a charset that will give you the best of both worlds in this case and it sounds like it would be best to run the conversion script. I would recommend backing up your data before you get started just in case the results aren't what you'll expect.
Storing article content as UTF-8 will ensure that any non-standard English characters are still able to show up. This means that you shouldn't run into any issues with Article Manager if you enter in some non-English text, special non-standard characters or even content pasted from something like Microsoft Word (special apostrophes, quotes, etc.)
I hope this helps Bill!
Cheers,
Mike Briggs - Product Specialist
support@interactivetools.com
Hire me!
Save time by getting our experts to help with your project. Template changes, advanced features, full integration, whatever you need. Whether you need one hour or fifty, get it done fast with Priority Consulting.
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BillG
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Apr 15, 2008, 4:10 PM
Post #5 of 6
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Re: [MikeB] Problem with "special" characters HELP!!!
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Well, it was a few hours worth of work to get the entire website & admin panel to conform, but I've (hopefully) encoded the entire website to UTF-8. The upgrade to AM2 was actually the easy part.
First, I opened all my ASP scripts in UltraEdit, and selected
File > Conversions > ASCII to UTF-8
UltraEdit put all the special characters in my scripts in proper coding.
One thing I found I had to do in ASP, in order to guarantee that all user agents will see the encoding correctly, is to add
<%
Response.ContentType="text/html"
Response.Charset="UTF-8"
%>
because the http-equiv declaration just isn't enough to properly set the HTTP headers. It's really mandatory to set the charset serverside because that's the only way to properly set the HTTP headers.
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Jake
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/ Moderator
Apr 15, 2008, 10:04 PM
Post #6 of 6
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Re: [BillG] Problem with "special" characters HELP!!!
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Hi Bill,
I'm glad to hear you got this worked out, and thanks a lot for posting those tips - they're certainly likely to come in handy for other Article Manager users!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Cheers,
Jake Swanson - Product Specialist
support@interactivetools.com
Hire me!
Save time by getting our experts to help with your project. Template changes, advanced features, full integration, whatever you need. Whether you need one hour or fifty, get it done fast with Priority Consulting.
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