Aarghh Help! Russian looks Chinese

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  • ekantnl
    New Member
    • May 2008
    • 15
    • 3.7.x

    Aarghh Help! Russian looks Chinese

    Hi there..

    I am running a multilanguage board (English, Dutch, German Russian etc)

    Till now I did not face any problems with messages from foreign countries..

    But now for the first time a member from Russia posted a msg and it looks like this to me:

    Âñåì ïðèâåò!
    Âîò çàêàí÷èâàåòñÿ îñåíü, ïîäêðàäûâàåòñÿ çèìà è âìåñòå ñ íåé ÷åðåäà íîâîãîäíèõ ïðàçäíèêîâ è ñâîáîäíûõ îò ðàáîòû äíåé!! Êàçàëîñü áû õîðîøî, à ÷åì çàíÿòüñÿ? Íå õî÷åòñÿ ïðîâåñòè ýòè äíè ëåæà íà äèâàíå. Äóìàþ ïðîâåñòè ýòè äíè ñ ïîëüçîé è óäîâîëüñòâèåì: óåõàòü êàòàòüñÿ íà ëûæàõ!
    Ñëûøàëà äàæå â Òóðöèè åñòü ãîðíîëûæíûå êóðîðòû! Ïîñîâåòóéòå ñòîèò ëè òóäà åõàòü êàòàòüñÿ? Ñêîëüêî ñòîèò è ò.ä.
    Èíòåðåñíà è ïîëåçíà ëþáàÿ èíôîðìôöèÿ
    I don't know what this member sees, but although my Russian is not good at all, even I can understand it's not Russian.

    Russian looks like this:

    Новый год и Рождество в Карпатах Закажи ту
    What's the problem, what to do, where to begin, how to solve this?

    Any help on this would be great
  • Floris
    Senior Member
    • Dec 2001
    • 37767

    #2
    AdminCP > Languages > Language Manager > edit settings

    Make sure the ISO type is set correctly.

    Comment

    • ekantnl
      New Member
      • May 2008
      • 15
      • 3.7.x

      #3
      Hallo Floris

      Thank you very much for your immediate respons.

      I have installed the Russian Language Pack (utf8) from here

      I have checked Language Manager > Russian > Edit Settings > HTML Character Set

      It is set to utf-8

      Till now I still see these Chinese characters (I have refreshed but that did not help).

      I understand from this Russian member that a friend of her, also Russian, also sees this Chinese characters on her pc.

      Maybe I have to change HTML Character Set?

      Comment

      • Floris
        Senior Member
        • Dec 2001
        • 37767

        #4
        I am not certain about what is involved in this. Usually it means the database itself has to be in utf8 too. There's a discussion thread for the language pack releases, you could ask the author to look into it?

        Comment

        • ekantnl
          New Member
          • May 2008
          • 15
          • 3.7.x

          #5
          Okay, I will.

          Thank you again for the help.

          Comment

          • ekantnl
            New Member
            • May 2008
            • 15
            • 3.7.x

            #6
            How to convert forum and database to uft8?

            I have contacted the language expert.

            He advised me to convert the whole forum to uft8.

            Well, I'll guess this 1 sentence will cost me 1 week.

            I understand from all the postings how to convert my forum to uft8.

            But the databse also needs to be converted to uft8 I guess??

            And this procedure is nowhere described on this forum.

            So..: How to convert a database to uft8?

            Comment

            • Floris
              Senior Member
              • Dec 2001
              • 37767

              #7
              I wouldn't just go and convert it, if you're unfamiliar with charsets.
              He also has a windows-number .xml file aside the utf8.

              Comment

              • ekantnl
                New Member
                • May 2008
                • 15
                • 3.7.x

                #8
                Yes.. but the big question is how to convert the database..

                Comment

                • Floris
                  Senior Member
                  • Dec 2001
                  • 37767

                  #9
                  no, i mean ..

                  Russian language pack for vBulletin 3.7.3
                  cp1251 (windows-1251) and UTF-8
                  Attached Files vbulletin373-Russian-language-cp1251.xml.zip‎ (235.1 KB, 117 views) vbulletin373-Russian-language-utf8.xml.zip‎ (261.3 KB, 43 views)

                  Try the other character type .. so maybe you dont have to convert.

                  Comment

                  • ekantnl
                    New Member
                    • May 2008
                    • 15
                    • 3.7.x

                    #10
                    Ah thank you.. I have already tried both and tried many html character settings but the problem remained.

                    I think this is going to be a hard nut to crack.

                    Comment

                    • zCarot [RU]
                      Senior Member
                      • Oct 2006
                      • 109
                      • 3.7.x

                      #11
                      Ok, ekantnl. I can explain how you got this "Chinese" characters.

                      Look at this:

                      Normal russian letters:


                      You will get this, if you try to see letters with cp1251 encoding in UTF8 encoding:

                      Or this (different browsers, different appearance)


                      And what YOU see on your forum:

                      It's happens because in most of your pages encoding is ISO-8859-1 (cp1252).
                      Some old browsers are send info directly, without converting to unicode, so you get this "Chinese" characters.

                      If you set up cp1251 on whole forum, then you will have got russian characters in europe languages (french, spanish, etc.)

                      Yes, you can use cp1252 and have no problem with any language.
                      vBulletin.com haven't them. But I don't know how are they do so..

                      My variant is convert whole forum to utf8. In this case you will not have any problems with the coding at future.

                      Comment

                      • ekantnl
                        New Member
                        • May 2008
                        • 15
                        • 3.7.x

                        #12
                        zCarot [RU], Thank you very much for your help!

                        Can you please write here what steps I need to do to get my forum in cp1251?

                        Thank you very very much for your help!

                        Comment

                        • zCarot [RU]
                          Senior Member
                          • Oct 2006
                          • 109
                          • 3.7.x

                          #13
                          ekantnl
                          You must convert to utf8 not to cp1251.

                          Steps:
                          1. Close your forum
                          2. Backup database
                          3. Convert backup from iso-8859-1/latin1/cp1252 to utf8 (do NOT delete original backup)
                            Use iconv or something like that
                          4. Upload converted backup
                          5. Change encoding of all your languages to UTF-8
                          6. Test it. If you will have some troubles - create new thread here


                          May be after that some your users which nickname or password are have russian characters could not login to your forum. You must rename them manually

                          Comment

                          • Floris
                            Senior Member
                            • Dec 2001
                            • 37767

                            #14
                            Very important: back everything up!

                            Comment

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