Xataface Forums

Hi.

I am developing a small database application for my lab. Here we all speak Spanish, so much of the text have accentuated characters (‡-œ and –). However, I have found an odd behavior when I use accentuated characters. Instead of showing them as such, Dataface replaces them with ? signs, and if I edit the registry and do not change it, Dataface stores them as �.

An example:
I type 'camale—n' and hit enter to save the registry.
The application shows 'camale?n'.
If I save the registry again, it then shows 'camale�n'.

It is odd, because I started using Dataface 0.5.3r2, and it worked. In fact, I noticed the problem after switching to 0.6. The funny thing is that these characters seem to be correctly stored in the database (checked with phpmyadmin), and if I force the browser to use ISO-8859-1 encoding or similar (the browsers switch to UTF-8 as expected when viewing Dataface pages), the characters are showed correctly. I have tried changing the character set of the database to utf8, but no difference.

I think that Dataface is showing the content of the fields as ISO-8859-1, but displaying the rest as UTF-8. I have tried creating a new application, just in case I had altered anything in the old one, but with the same results.

By the way, Dataface is the coolest thing I have found to develop database frontends (even for my lack of knowledge on PHP and SQL). 0.6 is really great. Thank you!

Felipe

Hi Thanks for pointing this out. You need to make a small change to the Dataface/templates/Dataface_Main_Template.html file to make this work properly. (the change will be included in the next minor release).

Just after the license etc.. you will find a line:


Change it to:

Hi,
Thank you for your fast answer, but there is no change. Whenever I include a non-ASCII character, it is showed as ? (�.

I have no clue...

Funny, that fixed it on my end.

When you load your page, check the source code (view source). The charset encoding should appear in 2 places:

1. At the beginning:

2.

The other thing now that could be causing the problem is that you mentioned that you changed the database encoding to UTF-8. Try changing it back to ISO-Latin-1.

Dataface is designed to use UTF-8 for multilingual sites and IS0-8859-1 (i.e. ISO-Latin-1) for standard single language sites. Unless multilingual content is turned on (which you shouldn't need to) it expects to get ISO-Latin-1 back from the DB. It looks like your DB is producing UTF-8 but Dataface is telling the browser that it is sending ISO-Latin-1, so the browser gimps it up.

i.e. Changing your DB encoding back to ISO-Latin-1 will likely fix this issue.

-Steve

Hi,

OK, I found the source of the problem. I just added default_charset = "iso-8859-1" to my php.ini, and everything worked.

In fact, I reverted the change in Dataface_Main_Template.html and it kept working right. Frankly, I cannot say what is happening. And yes, page source was correct, just like you indicated it should be. I even saved some pages as html, reloaded, and everything was OK; the browser (I tried Safary and Firefox) chose the proper charset. But when I loaded the pages from the server, the browser always selected UTF-8 (yes, I tried everything with the database and the mysql server).

Thank you

Sorry to resurrect such an old thread, but I had this exact same problem with a new application using Dataface 0.7.1. Everything is basically Latin-1 in my situation, but I had special characters such as ™ and bullet symbols that were showing up as gibberish in Dataface. They showed up perfectly fine in phpMyAdmin, and the charsets in the HTML source already showed ISO-8859-1. However, the Character Encoding in Firefox when I loaded the page was detected as Unicode (UTF-8). If I manually changed it to Western (ISO-8859-1), the symbols appeared correctly.

Looking further, this setting appears to have come from the HTTP response headers:

Code: Select all

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

So, even though the HTML specified ISO-8859-1, the web server (Apache) was apparently over-riding it with UTF-8. According to my Apache httpd.conf file (this is the default setting on Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora systems):

Code: Select all

#
# Specify a default charset for all content served; this enables
# interpretation of all content as UTF-8 by default.  To use the
# default browser choice (ISO-8859-1), or to allow the META tags
# in HTML content to override this choice, comment out this
# directive:
#
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

After finding this post, I added the default_charset = "iso-8851-1" setting. I put it at the top of my Dataface application's index.php file instead of php.ini, as follows:

Code: Select all

ini_set('default_charset','iso-8859-1');

That one change fixed everything. Note: I have not used the oe and ie settings in conf.ini, so they should have already been set as the default (ISO-8859-1).

This tip was very helpful in my case, so hopefully this post will help someone else too.