Hi,

Robin Smidsrød wrote:
> Okay, I'm trying to get my webapplication, which uses Locale::TextDomain to
> display Norwegian characters, and it's turning out to be a real headache.
> Now everything works, but all my national characters turn up on the webage
> as question marks.
> I use CGI.pm and mod_perl 2.0.1 (apache2), and initially in the application
> I set $q->charset('UTF-8').
> ...

I would recommend to use utf-8 in your web application.  But you have to make
sure that you really generate utf-8 strings _and_ that your web server issues
a header with the correct encoding:

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

You can check that with the option "--save-headers" from wget, and also in
most browsers (for example in Mozilla try View->Character Encoding).

I suspect that your web server does not respond with the correct header,
probably because the web server configuration contains an "AddDefaultCharset"
directive.  Try to override that in the virtual host configuration with:

	AddDefaultCharset Off
	# Alternatively:
	AddDefaultCharset utf-8

See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset for
details.  Many Linux vendors have this directive in their web server
configuration.

In order to make absolutely sure that you really spit out utf-8, you should
do this:

	Locale::Messages::nl_putenv ("LANGUAGE=nb_NO.utf8");
	Locale::Messages::nl_putenv ("LANG=nb_NO.utf8");
	Locale::Messages::nl_putenv ("LC_ALL=nb_NO.utf8");
	Locale::Messages::nl_putenv ("LC_MESSAGES=nb_NO.utf8");
	Locale::Messages::nl_putenv ("OUTPUT_CHARSET=utf-8");
	setlocale (LC_ALL, "");

This should do the trick.

BTW, it is preferable to set environment variables, and then call setlocale
with an empty second argument.  Not only, because it is slightly more
portable, but it is also safer if some other part of your application or a
foreign module calls setlocale() behind your back.

Ciao,
Guido
--
Imperia AG, Development
Leyboldstr. 10 - D-50354 Hürth - http://www.imperia.net/

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