[Koha] Need help to deal with special characters

[ZHANG, YIN]

Hello All,

We are using Koha 3.0 in Ubuntu 8 for a collection with many items in foreign languages. It is our understanding that Koha 3.0 should be able to handle Unicode. However, we have problems to insert any some special characters in non-English.

Basically, the database will chop anything followed a special character. If the string we try to insert is "Den økonomiske", only "Den " gets in. If a special character starts a string, it ends up with an empty string in the database.

Here is our Koha database configuration as created:
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                       |
| character_set_connection | utf8                       |
| character_set_database   | utf8                       |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
| character_set_results    | utf8                       |
| character_set_server     | utf8                       |
| character_set_system     | utf8                       |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+

There is a twist that we can't understand. When we temporally set the font to latin1 (e.g., set names latin1), the database can take the special characters without problem:

+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | latin1                     |
| character_set_connection | latin1                     |
| character_set_database   | utf8                       |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
| character_set_results    | latin1                     |
| character_set_server     | utf8                       |
| character_set_system     | utf8                       |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+

Any idea what is going on? Thanks so much for your help in advance!

Yin

Yin Zhang
School of Library and Information Science
Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242
email: yzhang4 at kent.edu<mailto:yzhang4 at kent.edu>


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