[ic] chinese language

[ic at 3edge.com]

Darnell Hudson writes: 

> My client needs to have Chinese language on the website. And want to see if
> IC supports Chinese language. What I did do is put the big5 on the top 
> but does not work
> very well.

It is possible but not very simple with the out of the box Interchange. It 
will need tweaks and a lot of testing/trying. Also I'm sure you have to 
prepare your database to handle big5 etc ... Good luck. 

That it is possible to have chinese/double byte languages you can look at:
https://www.highdefinition.ch/    (click on language and pick chinese)
http://www.allcarmodels.com/      (click on 'website other country', pick 
'Greece' and language 'Ellinika') 

Both sites however are not using the native encoding (so not big5 for 
chinese , or ISO8859-7 for greek), but are using UTF8. 

If in the future you will need to handle more than chinese, other double 
byte languages, then I'd suggest you go with UTF8 and not with big5 or other 
native encodings. 

In Interchange 5.6 exists experimental support for UTF8.  Experimental means 
that some things work and some things don't  ... Below some info on how to 
get Interchange 5.6 into UTF8 mode: 

	There are two variables that will need to be added to your
	catalog.cfg:  MV_HTTP_CHARSET and MV_UTF8.  They should be set
	like so: 

	    Variable MV_HTTP_CHARSET UTF-8
	    Variable MV_UTF8         1 

	The MV_UTF8 variable tells the system that we are using UTF-8
	for stuff internally when that needs to be specified.  Perl mostly
	does the right thing wrt UTF-8, but when we need to explicitly
	specify for one of a handful of reasons, this variable lets us
	configure that. 

	The MV_HTTP_CHARSET specifies which character set that the web
	pages are going to be encoded with.  UTF-8 is the only value that
	has been tested at the moment, although it probably generalises
	to whatever you would like to use. 

	Communication with the database introduces three database
	directives.  These are required to ensure that data is properly
	communicated with the database: 

	    PG_ENABLE_UTF8
	    MYSQL_ENABLE_UTF8
	    GDBM_ENABLE_UTF8 

	These can be set on a table by table basis or with DatabaseDefault.
	You will probably want to set the one for the sql database you are
	using and one for GDBM, like so: 

	    DatabaseDefault PG_ENABLE_UTF8 1
	    DatabaseDefault GDBM_ENABLE_UTF8 1 

	You will need to make sure that your database is encoded in UTF-8
	and that all of your data is encoded that way as well. 

	Enabling UTF-8 should not cause any problems if your data is all in
	US-ASCII, but might cause problems if other encodings are involved. 

   * Note: This commit is missing the latest safeuntrap/reval/safetrap
     code, which should be added ASAP.  In the meantime, the following
     works in the interchange.cfg file (with Perl 5.8.8): 

	SafeUntrap  rand require caller dofile print 


CU, 

Gert