[ic] Non-US keys = UTF-8 issue?

Sat Feb 9 10:54:47 EST 2008

> >> Email order receipt will not be send as UTF8 charset, so it's quite
> >> plausible that Swedish characters are messed up. Proper UTF8 support
> >> is still under development.
> >>
> >> Regards
> >>          Racke
> >
> > Will IC pass unicode characters properly to mysql?  Should they be
> > displayed properly with [value]?
>
> As has been noted in this thread already, full unicode support is far
> from trivial, and is something that can be difficult to put in as an
> afterthought.  If you are just concerned with the out-going emails
> (i.e., the site appears to function fine), you can try to use one of
> the following approaches:
>
> If you are using the [email] tag to send out your confirmation/order
> emails and you know that all of the data will be in the UTF-8
> encoding, you can add explicit calls to the tag usertag to output
> mime headers as shown:
>
> [email <to, from, etc> extra="[tag op=mime arg=header]"]
> [tag op='mime' type='text/plain; charset="utf-8"']
> <body content here>
> [/email]
>
> Another option (depending on how much you want to get your hands
> dirty) is to roll-your-own email sending usertag/routine in Perl
> which can harness both Encode and MIME::Lite to explicitly manage/
> handle the coercion of data to the desired encoding.
>
> Please note that if you have non-ascii data that you want to appear
> in the email headers (to, from, subject, etc) you will need to
> explicitly encode the data using the MIME-Header encoding to handle
> this properly.
>
> Good Luck,
>
> David

Thanks David.  I'm not so much concerned with email being displayed
properly as I am with having the customer's shipping address.  Maybe
the thing to do is use [tag] as you suggested to always send a
separate UTF-8 email to the admin containing just the shipping address
so we're sure to have that.  We would need to run that UTF-8 address
through IC to ship though, so that may not do any good anyway.  It
sounds like UTF-8 data is messed up as soon as it hits IC, but maybe
not.  I'm still not clear on that.

- Grant