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Character Sets

The default character set for connectDaily is UTF-8. UTF-8 is a variant of Unicode that encodes characters using a variable number of bytes. For characters in English, the characters would be 8 bits. For characters in other languages, the character would be encoded in 2 or 3 bytes.

For most users, UTF-8 is a good choice. It gives the most compatibility for the broadest possible audience. UTF-8 also allows mixing text on the same page in different languages. In other words, with UTF-8 it would be possible to display both Russian and German text on the same page. Using an ISO-8859-xx series single-byte character set would not permit this. The only issue that may arise is that some older browsers may not display UTF-8 characters correctly. If you need compatibility with these older browsers, it will be necessary to add an entry to your configuration.properties file to override the default character set. The entry would appear as:

charset=iso-8859-1

Set the character set to the appropriate value for your location. You should also ensure that the content type header specified in any custom header files is appropriate to the character set you are using. A sample content type header is shown below.

<HEAD>
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<LINK REL="stylesheet" HREF="style.css" TYPE="text/css">
<TITLE>connectDaily Web Calendaring System</TITLE>
</HEAD>

You should also make sure that the character set/collation selected for your database is compatible with the character set you configure for connectDaily. If your database supports Unicode, we strongly urge you to use it.

See Also

Appendix E - Internationalization and Localization

Localizing Screen Captions

Localizing Headers and Footers, Instructions, and EMail Templates