Problem with special characters iso-8859-1/utf-8 (with solution)

Q: Why are strings that use special characters (like äöüß) broken (everything after the special character is trimmed)?

A: If you're using special characters like the german umlauts (äöüß) or other non standard characters inside form fields (for instance in the street field under company details), you could run into problems like the following:

You enter your street adress, lets say it's "Ernst-Thälmann-Straße" (notice the a-Umlaut) and after submitting the page to save the data only "Ernst-Th" appears in the address overview.

Chances are, that your browser uses the wrong character encoding while viewing the page (activeCollab uses "utf-8" so you want to go for that one). While checking the meta-tags activeCollab submits to the user, you see the following:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

You try to choose "utf-8" under "View->Character Encoding" in your browser, and after resubmitting the form with utf-8 charset encoding selected, the street field is not cut off anymore, but on the next page, the special characters get displayed distorted (because the browser switched back to another charset encoding i.e. iso-8859-1 etc.).

If that is the case, your webserver probably submits the wrong charset in the http-headers. You can try and find out through watching the output of wget with showing headers activated:

wget -S http://activecollab.example.com

If there's a line saying the following:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

you've found the reason why your browser is choosing the "wrong" charset encoding.

Solution:
If you are able the change the virtualhost options of the specific subdomain you're using for activeCollab, you can add another line:

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

That should solve the problem, at least it worked for me...

hope this helps,
Gabriel

ps: not to mention that this is of course NOT a bug of activeCollab...

Maybe another solution would be to resubmit the right content-header every time with the php-header function ( header('Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8'); ), but I heaven't tried that one, because I think it wouldn't be a "clean" solution to submit the same header twice (first by apache and afterwards by php).

But if it works, this could be an option for someone sitting on a shared host not beeing able to change the virtual host settings.

Hi Rolando,
you have to edit your virtual host configuration file (in most cases you'll find it under /etc/httpd/vhost.conf or httpd.conf). There should be some entries defining the virtual hosts. Locate the one that is responsible for your activeCollab host (i.e. ac.private.net)

Add another entry (AddDefaultCharset utf-8) between the virtual-host tags like so:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin name@example.com
  DocumentRoot /srv/www/activeCollab/public/
  ServerAlias ac
  ServerName ac.private.net:80
  ErrorLog logs/ac-error.log
  CustomLog logs/ac-access.log common
  AddDefaultCharset utf-8
<directory /srv/www/activeCollab/public/>
  AllowOverride all
</directory>
</VirtualHost>

If you need a more detailed instruction, maybe here in the forum there's another ubuntu user who can give a more ubuntu focused explanation.

hope that helps,
Gabriel

Can't you just add the line "AddDefaultCharset utf-8" to .htaccess in the home-directory of ActiveCollab?

@hgpuke:
hehe, of course you are right, as AddDefaultCharset may also appear in .htaccess context

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset

(as long as the virtualhost is defined to allow .htaccess for the directory through AllowOverride command)