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Re: [grouper-users] RE: Foreign characters not displaying correctly in user interfaces


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  • From: Keith Hazelton <>
  • To: Richard James <>,
  • Subject: Re: [grouper-users] RE: Foreign characters not displaying correctly in user interfaces
  • Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 08:17:15 -0500

Non-rhetorical question: Is there a reason NOT to go with UTF-8 in this
situation? In general it gives more consistent and broader coverage of
non-English character sets
--Keith
______________

On Mar 29, 2011, at 08:10, Chris Hyzer wrote:

> Fyi when I query my DB command line or in sqlyog, I don't see what I
> expect, but Im not sure why, Grouper shows the right thing on the screen...
>
> mysql> select name from grouper_groups where name like 'test:%';
> +----------------+
> | name |
> +----------------+
> | test:tást |
> | test:testGroup |
> +----------------+
> 2 rows in set (0.00 sec)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard James
> [mailto:]
>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2011 6:53 AM
> To: Chris Hyzer;
>
> Subject: RE: Foreign characters not displaying correctly in user interfaces
>
> Hi Chris,
>
> We are running this on a Unix machine. Yep that is the main problem we have
> had, trying to identify at what stage the characters aren't being
> interpreted correctly.
>
> Currently our character variables show up as follows;
>
> mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%';
> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
> | Variable_name | Value |
> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
> | character_set_client | latin1 |
> | character_set_connection | latin1 |
> | character_set_database | latin1 |
> | character_set_filesystem | binary |
> | character_set_results | latin1 |
> | character_set_server | latin1 |
> | character_set_system | utf8 |
> | character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
> 8 rows in set (0.00 sec)
>
> It may be the case that these need to be utf8, although when querying the
> database via the command line or PhpMyAdmin the accented characters are
> displayed correctly. I will try to change these on our test box to see if
> it makes any difference. (The local variables shown on PhpMyAdmin are set
> to UTF-8).
>
> It's the subject where we are coming across the problem, we load subject
> details into a subject table in the grouper database, when loading this
> data we have tried loading it using ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 but this doesn't
> seem to change anything. The table has been setup so that it is using the
> utf8_unicode_ci collation. I was wondering if it might be when the JDBC
> connector for the subject sources connects to the database that it isn't
> using the correct char encoding? Just a guess not sure about the internals.
>
> This might well be a separate issue from Grouper, I will keep on having a
> look into it and feedback any possible solutions I come across.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Regards
>
> Richard James
> Infrastructure Systems Administrator
> ISS Systems Architecture
> Newcastle University
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Chris Hyzer
>> [mailto:]
>> Sent: 28 March 2011 17:33
>> To: Richard James;
>>
>> Subject: RE: Foreign characters not displaying correctly in user
>> interfaces
>>
>> Are you running the server on unix or windows? Ive seen difficulties in
>> windows if it is setup a certain way to support these chars.
>> Unfortunately there are a lot of factors here: database OS, app server
>> OS, database charset, app server OS, browser, etc
>>
>>
>> Does this show utf-8 on all lines that it should? (mine doesn't, does
>> yours?)
>>
>> mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%';
>> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
>> | Variable_name | Value |
>> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
>> | character_set_client | utf8 |
>> | character_set_connection | utf8 |
>> | character_set_database | latin1 |
>> | character_set_filesystem | binary |
>> | character_set_results | utf8 |
>> | character_set_server | latin1 |
>> | character_set_system | utf8 |
>> | character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
>> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
>> 8 rows in set (0.00 sec)
>>
>>
>> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%';
>>
>>
>>
>> The grouperdemo server is on unix, and I didn't do anything special do
>> it, and it seems fine. I created a group with a special char, and
>> attached are the screenshots for the UI and UI-lite with a windows
>> browser (unix server/db mysql)...
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Chris
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From:
>>
>> [
>> ]
>> On Behalf Of Richard James
>> Sent: Monday, March 28, 2011 12:04 PM
>> To:
>>
>> Subject: [grouper-users] Foreign characters not displaying correctly in
>> user interfaces
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> We've recently come across a problem with foreign characters (most
>> notably accented characters) not displaying correctly in the main
>> Grouper UI and the Lite UI. It replaces these characters with a question
>> mark as shown in the attached screenshot. I saw a post in the mailing
>> list from February last year
>> (https://lists.internet2.edu/sympa/arc/grouper-users/2010-
>> 02/msg00012.html) which discussed possible solutions to rectify the
>> problem, unfortunately we have not been able to come up with a solution.
>> I have tried amending the following files to use UTF-8, unfortunately
>> although the changes are reflected in the source code and in the browser
>> meta data, the character is still displayed incorrectly.
>>
>> edu.internet2.middleware.grouper.ui.util.HttpContentType
>> grouper.html
>> head.jsp
>> template.jsp
>>
>> The characters are displayed correctly in the database (mysql), the
>> collation for the column is set to utf8_unicode_ci. I've tried
>> explicitly setting a LANG environment variable to en_GB.UTF-8 on the
>> server, and also in the tomcat start-up script in case there was a
>> conflict at the end, but again to no avail.
>>
>> A few little tests I tried to test behaviour was to, via the main UI,
>> change a name of group to include an accented character, i.e. tást. This
>> displays correctly in the UI, but if you look in the database it is
>> represented by tást.
>>
>> I was wondering if anyone else has come across this issue? And if so if
>> can you suggest how we can overcome this problem.
>>
>> Unfortunately within the subject search in the lite UI, the accented
>> character does also cause an xml load error (screenshot attached). This
>> happens when searching for a user where the name contains an foreign
>> character.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Richie
>>
>>
>> Richard James
>> Infrastructure Systems Administrator
>> ISS Systems Architecture
>> Newcastle University
>>
>




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