Topic awaiting preservation: Form information in other laguages.

On the website here we have a form that users can fill out to request more information.
With our expansion into markets overseas we are now getting forms back that look like this:

name: Николай

as people fill it out in Russian. We can handle the Cyrilic characters when we see them but is there anyway to keep them from showing up like this?
I'm thinking not as it is sent to use in a plain text email.

The current solution is I put them into a web page that displays it properly then send that back to the marketing person.

__________________________
Eagles get sucked into jet engines and weasels are oft maligned, but beavers just make nice hats.

FA@H

Huh?
You'd only see this if you were running htmlentities() on the form before sending it out via plain email.
(d'oh).

You probably should be able to specify your 'plain text e-mail' as unicode (UTF-8), thereby avoiding the whole problem
(provided your receiver has the necessary fonts, and a decent mail reader, of course).

So long,

->Tyberius Prime

Shows about how much I know about this stuff.

Thanks for the help.

__________________________
Eagles get sucked into jet engines and weasels are oft maligned, but beavers just make nice hats.

FA@H

Well, not entirely your fault. Internationalization in this day and age is a wee bit troublesome.

Tyberius Prime: Yet I'm surprised by how many people using a language with characters outside of the standard 7bits ASCII code keep using ISO-8859-1 encoding for their documents and struggle with ENTITIES. I'm also guilty of that but try hard every day to get better at L10N.

Using an appropriate character encoding ( read UTF-8) is the right way to go, but often, it's
only a small part of the battle. Especially for those working on operatingsystems and the like.
Have a look at Michael Kaplan's blog over at Microsoft
for some of the tedious issues. Even the sort order in swedish isn't quite that simple.

So long,

->Tyberius Prime

Are you talking about, i.e: considering aa as the single å following z

Using FR and UK keyboards I have to fire the charmap quite often to pick French and Norwegian characters and hadn't thought about that before. Luckily in my applications I only had to sort things by properties that make sense in every language, such as creation/modification date or distance.

I wonder if JavaScript's sort() method is localized based on the language setting of your browser ... I doubt it but that would be nice.

Thanks for bringing that up.

Well, the specific instance I have in mind is that words staring with V and W were sorted together until very recently.