I tried adding some Japanese content directly into the theme.html file at my site and for some reason cannot get it to display correctly. The site content -- which is primarily Japanese -- displays okay but the stuff embedded into the theme.html file is all garbled up.

When I change the page encoding in Internet Explorer 6 the theme changes display OK but all of the site content becomes garbled. It seems to be a kind of one or the other situation. I can't get both the site content and the theme changes to display correctly at the same time.

I've tried changing the XOOPS language variable in the theme meta tag but the result was the same. I've also tried setting lang=ja through the div tags but the result was the same. I've also checked around XOOPS Japan for similar issues but turned up nothing. Any idea what's going on? It's like the theme is going through a shredder before picking up the content from the database.

For those who run across this issue in the future, I managed to solve the problem, more or less, by inputting the Japanese directly through the filemanager in control panel. Doing so changes the characters into unicode [eg の] which means they'll display okay on the page but are indecipherable in HTML view, making them uneditable.

These are the kinds of issues I'm coming to despise more and more about XOOPS in particular and PHP in general: what a colossal waste of time. It all too frequently takes 5 or 6 hours to overcome something that could be dealt with in a matter of moments in straight up HTML. If I can find an easy way out, I'll take it.

I think you needed to use a html editor that supports the same encoding as your content uses. If you use the japanese language pack I think that's in EUC-JP...? So the editor needs to also be using that encoding.

Text editors like JEdit can do this, provided you have the language installed on your pc. Dreamweaver also can change encodings, I believe.

Rowd

I suspect it's more fundamental than that, rowdie. We tried Dreamweaver on both a Japanese system and an English system with IME installed. We also tried using Word and Notepad on the Japanese system, tried changing the page language meta tags to EUC-JP. Some have suggested the whole issue might have something to do with MBSTRING in PHP.INI but the fact remains I should not have to endure all of that to get a couple snippets of text to display properly. It's unacceptable. For the time being, unicode will have to do.