Change default charset?..

G2 requires utf-8, period.
if possible, i'd change the charset in the mambo head section to utf-8. what's wrong with utf-8?

have you tried using utf-8 as the charset for mambo pages? what does the result look like?

how does your windows-1251 content look when you set the <meta content-type header of mambo to utf-8 ?

you can try to start hacking your g2 to output in windows-1251 though...don't know if it's feasible.

UTF-8 is so general, there's no real reason to use another charset. or is there?

you'd have to convert all g2 output from utf-8 to the other encoding. we have the necessary functions already in place etc. feel free to try your luck.

hmm, it might be not that easy. i'd say G2 is not ready to switch to non utf-8 output encoding easily.
the easiest fix would have been if smarty would accept a parameter for the encoding. smarty does the rendering so it would be the right place to convert everything. if you convert the strings before, somewhere in G2, you'd get different problems because G2 expects all internal strings to be unicode.

unless another dev has a (better) idea, i'd say you can't switch to non utf-8 output without hacking your G2. no embedded G2 for you then...
(a dirty fix would be to have charset = utf-8 in embedded g2 pages (com_gallery) and the other charset on all other pages of your mambo install.

Lufa,

And what you can say about storing data in mysql database? It looks like scrambled characters, isntead of russian symbols..
When my russian users write russian comments, they are shown correctly, but can not be recognized by G2 search functions, or by search engine.

Hmmm, Valiant..
I'm not sure it's the bug infact.. I have not tuned up G2 to use proper language...

'Your webserver does not support localization. Please instruct your system administrator to reconfigure PHP with the gettext option enabled'

I'm not familiar with gettext func, so i'm to see whether my tuning is right or not.. I can't understand this function.. So now i'm not ready to report a bug without being sure that i'm right for sure and it's a real bug..

Guys look:

I have some site in CP1251 charset. I'm using Mambo CMS. It looks great for me.

I have fresh G2 install. When I go to http://mysite.com/gallery2/ I can see my gallery (imported from G1). I like it! Everything is OK. My pictures are creatю All text data looks fine (UTF charset).

Now! I'm trying to use G2 embedded in my site using Mambo G2 Component.
Remember? Site Data are in CP1251, and Gallery Text Data in UTF.

It's terrible! My CMS trying to interpritate G2 UTF Data like CP1251 (HTML Meta tag "saying" that)! Or, sometimes I can see G2 data well, but all html page is showing like UTF. You see, my pages data are the charecter code according some character table (cp1251). In embedded G2 wich somewhow "overwriting" page charset (meta tag), all codes are searching in UTF character table. Finally I'm getting totally different characters.

That's is my problem.(((

No database problems.

Sorry, I dont think I'm good enaught in PHP...(((
But I wonder that only my have the such problem.

Thank all of you for trying to help!

No, I did not...((((

Puntukas, while your hack isn't a real solution (G2 will still output in utf-8, but your browser interprets it as windows-1257), it brought me to an idea.

Additional to your one line change, we could use G2's translation functions to change the internal utf-8 data to any output encoding/charset!

most g2 content is fed through GalleryTranslater::translateDomain().
in this function, we could change the encoding type of the text to a non-utf8 type before returning the text.

but i just realized that this won't work. without further changes.

1. we'd have to run everything to a filter, not just the text that we translate. e.g. text that comes from the database has to be converted too, but only when outputting
2. translate is also used when inserting certain data into the database (e.g. the registered users group at install time).

i don't have time to work on it any time soon, just pointing out that there are some challenges and one had to make sure only to convert when outputting.

no, no progress / development in this direction.
but if someone has time, please submit a patch to switch the g2 output / input charset to anything possible.
also see:
http://gallery.menalto.com/node/24999#comment-137375

I wrote this code for my webpage.
I have Gallery2 with UTF-8 and Mambo with ISO-8859-2 and I use com_gallery2 and mod_gallery2_image to show my albums.
You can change function utf82iso88592 to convert UTF-8 to different charset.

Rafal

thanks for sharing.

but you'll face some problems:

- now you changed the html output from utf8 to iso8859-2, which is cool.
- but G2 still expects input to be in UTF-8 (all form data input), so you'd have to convert the GET/POST data too but the other way around, from iso8859-2 to utf8.

btw:
your idea could be a good workaround / simple solution for most embedded G2 users. just run the whole html output through a conversion function.
the input convertToUtf8 call could easily be added in GalleryUtilities::sanitize* or ::getRequestVariables

GalleryCoreApi::convertFromUtf8
GalleryCoreApi::convertToUtf8

call it in GalleryUtilities::getRequestVariables

Hi, i come a time ago to a similar solution and faced bad bad problems - see my post half a year ago. My whole databasis was corrupted and i had to face a absolute new installation of g2.

i absolutly can't recommend that solution.

btw: Joomla is on the way to UTF-8 - so i will just sit this problem out...

A more detailed instruction would be needed about how to add ISO-8859-2 support...
I was not able to do the modding based on the mentioned docs you created.