Special Characters for French are not displayed
 

Hi

I have two blogs with wordpress 3. One with the wordpress theme by default (Blog1) and the other other with atahualpa 3.5.1 theme (blog2).

With the blog2 , i can not see the special french characters in my homepage.However in the blog1 I can see these french characteres.

My wordpress and atahualpa is in english . I've put the french po,mo in wordpress/content folder. I don't use the atahualpa french files .



Thanks

Does this problem only occur when viewing excerpts?

Yes, only with the excerpts.
I've tested with « read more» and it works well.

What's happening is you have some non-printing characters that are causing problems. WordPress by default strips html tags from from excerpts. Atahualpa has a setting in ATO>Configure EXCERPTS to only show excerpts or full posts on various pages. You can set this to show full posts and the issue goes away. I have no way to experiment but perhaps there is something you can add to Don's strip these tags? to fix it as well.

If you PM me a login and password I could take a look.

I have a similar problem, and I'm sure it's Wordpress, not the theme. I want to use the word puree with the acute accent in the body of a post and in the headline. It works fine in the body but not in the headline. Obviously, Wordpress is stripping out the diacritical marks in the headline.

I'll research it at wordpress.org, but if anybody has a quick fix, I'm all ears.

UPDATE:

OK, I found the solution to my problem. While you can use the Omega icon to bring up special characters in Tiny MCE Advanced and then paste them within a post in Visual mode, to add one to the headline, you must switch to HTML mode. You paste in the special character, and when you publish, you'll see the special character. Voila! http://www.larchmontgazette.com/dine...sparagus-soup/

And I have tried those same characters in both the body and the title and they show just fine in both excerpts and full text. I am using the ascii code to insert them. Is that how you are as well Paula? How about you Shirley?

I'm using the HTML code, as in .

If I use the html code I get the same results as you Paula. If I use for example alt+130 to use the ascii code for the eacute; it works fine.

Good to know, Larry. But my way, I don't have to keep a cheat-sheet handy. :)

The problem is only with the character « à ». the ascci code is ALT+133. I've used the omega icon to insert it and it does not work neither with the ascci code.

Also I have a french keyboard.

It is only with the excerpts. It is an intranet i can not sent you the link. My client wants the excerpts in the home page :( .

Update : The problem is only with the excerpts, title, full post is ok. I've used the fonction «Dont strip» <p><a><span><em> but i have the same results.

Shirley, I am using WP 3.0 and Atahualpa 3.5.3. Look at the first excerpt at http://www.larchmontgazette.com/. I was able to use the e-acute code when I created the post, but I was in HTML view at the time.

The problem is with the character « à ».

I just tested that character in the same excerpt, and it worked fine. I can't leave it there because it's a live site, and the post's author would be upset to find this random character there!

Are you sure you're using HTML mode when creating the post? Be sure to publish from that mode, don't switch back to the visual editor first.

I have to work at it to get the html characters to show and then when I refresh all is good. I have no clue unless it is on the server. Could the php version have anything to do with it? How about the host? I would need to test on a site where the problems are occurring.

Larry, would WP 3.0 even run without PHP 5?

I think so but with "issues". I recently replaced an old Joomla site with a WordPress site and the site wasn't quite "right" I checked the php version and it was set to 4. I am not sure though whether I had WP 2.9.2 or 3 installed at the time. This was really just a shot in the dark and something easy to check. I'm scratching my head on this one.

I have php 5 and mysql 5.

What is the function that works with the excerpts in the home page? Maybe I need to modify something there. :(

There is a section in the ATO for excerpts

I mean in the code. Maybe I have to modify the php code . I want to add that I have a windows server and i've tried at home (windows xp) I got the same result.

I have no idea how a Windows server might affect WordPress and I pretty much stay out of the code as than makes upgrading the Theme more cumbersome as you have to remember all the changes. That is to say nothing about finding the code in the first place.

If it works for me on a live site, it should work for you. I can't see any PHP reason for just that one character not working. You've tried other special characters using the method I outlined above?

Have you both tried with the character « à » in the excerpt in the visual editor without using the html code ? Maybe it is dificult since you don't have a french keyboard.

Well, I've tried the html editor and in the excerpts I've put &agrave;. and voila! it works.

However my client is not a technical person for that reason I wanted that he uses the visual editor.

I've just bought a shared linux hosting plan and i will see how it works.

Well it seems likely that it is just how the keyboard "codes" the « à » but at least you have a work around albeit not the simplest way.

I'll bet the French keyboard produces the ascii code, not HTML, so it wasn't getting interpreted properly by Wordpress. This is an inherent problem for a client like yours, I guess. Have you looked in the wordpress.org forums for ideas? This can't be the first time this problem has appeared in the WP community.

To help your client, you could write out a step-by-step process for inserting the proper HTML code. Or this could be an opportunity for you to have a maintenance contract, where you'll have to come in and fix his grave accents when he needs one! :p

I've been doing my test using Atahualpa 3.4.9 before someone told me to use the new version 3.5.3.

I've just changed the theme of my blog and with atahualpa 3.4.9 it works!!!. The excerpts works.

So it means there is something rare in Atahualpa 3.5.3. Maybe the excerpts functions are not the same ?

Any clue ? I would love to use the latest version of Atahualpa.

Shirley, i have same prolem with char "à", too. T_T

If you installed Atahualpa 3.4.9 the excerpt works , but in the 3.5.3 version it does not wokr the «à» , it put an square instead of it.

I hope someone else has a solution for 3.5.3

Any new ideas to get the 'à' working?

update: the 'à' gets displayed correctly if I replace the 'à' with &agrave; in the HTML code of the post and then immediately save it (no switching back to HTML mode - it replaces &agrave; with an 'à' again = same problem).

but that's not really a solution since there are a lot of 'à' in a lot of posts!! and it's hard to tell people to manually replace the 'à' with &agrave; in their HTML code ... :(

any other ideas?

JeromeH - can you give the url of your site and point to a post with the issue?

Hi, the site isn't live/public yet so I can't give you a link. But I've taken a screenshot:

http://www.symposium.lu/popbio2008/f...907-154919.png

Note the black diamond in the excerpts. They don't show in the full posts.

Jerome, would you be willing to do a database backup and email it to me?maybe I can recreate it with your data.

Crasy, i were coming crazy with this error.
I found a way to avoid the problem by changing the expression in the preg_split function.
Look like to be a problem with this php function.

So in the function bfa_wp_trim_excerpt($text) (you can find it in function php of the theme)

You change twice the argument of the preg_split call.

// OLD $words = preg_split("/\s+/", $text);
$words = preg_split("/[ \r\t\f\n]+/", $text);

:confused:

I tried this, but unfortunately it does not do the trick for me...

First, the excerpts do now contain the images (they were stripped off by the initial version of the code).

Then I cannot figure out why, but one of my agrave is still showing funny... Please have a look.
http://jeanmichel.cazaux.free.fr/TB3...athaulpa-3.png

I tried this with the default WP theme (twenty-ten 1.1) and all my "à" look fine.

I am using WP 3.0.1 and Athualpa 3.5.3

Any help will be much appreciated.

Jean-Michel

Hello juggledad ...

we're having the same issues here ... our site is live at http://ttnff.selfip.com, should you still be interested in seeing it "live".

The "diamonds" are visible in Firefox, in IE they appear are squares.

I've tried the recommendations in this thread, with varying levels of success - none however fixes the "issue" completely.

Tom.

can you point to a post with the issue?
p.s. in the photos 'Iceland 2010' second photo - is that your daughter? Why are teenagers the same the world over - 'looks' over 'comfort'?

Juggledad,

bright-eyes in the second photo is my cousin's daughter; mine is the toddler.

If you switch the language to french on the homepage, you will see most excerpts (and only the excerpts) have the "funny characters" described in this thread.

What's boggling me however is that overnight they changed from the black diamond with "?" to the squares with "FR".

Anyway, would be nice to have your view on this.

I copied the first post in 'french' and posted it into my test site, but both the excerpts and full post is fine.

what is the plug-in you have to switch languages? Would you let me in to poke around. I'd like to get a dump of your database and see if I can recreate it. If so send me a PM with an admin ID and PW or do an sql export of the db and email it to me.

tmarien
can you send me your nl_NL.mo and fr_FR.mo files?

Hi

I've just updated to the new theme atahualpa 3.6 but i have the same issue. I can send you the backup of my database to your personal email if you don't mind.