[Catalyst] tips for troubleshooting/QAing Unicode

Darren Duncan darren at darrenduncan.net
Mon Sep 29 00:59:10 BST 2008


J. Shirley wrote:
> Hey Darren, great post!
> 
> Can you post it on the wiki, perhaps at:
> 
> http://dev.catalystframework.org/wiki/faq link to "Unicode
> Troubleshooting" in the Unicode section there?  It would be much
> appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> -J

I have gone and added a section to 
http://dev.catalystframework.org/wiki/gettingstarted/tutorialsandhowtos/using_unicode 
that has a slightly edited version of my email post.

In the process, I discovered that your wiki appears to have a Unicode 
handling problem, which I black-box debugged and present here.

If you go to the above url when you are not logged in and your browser has 
its cache/cookies/etc flushed beforehand, then my Japanese text sample will 
display correctly.  But if you login to your account and then view the 
page, then the Japanese text sample will not display properly.  Moreover, 
if you logout after being logged in and refresh the page again, it still 
doesn't display properly, but if you wipe your cache/cookies/etc (I haven't 
narrowed it down yet), and then refresh that page, then it displays properly.

I see this same behaviour on both Firefox 3.0.3 and Safari 3.1.2, both on 
Mac OS X 10.5.5 PPC.  A telnet to the server on port 80 also displays 
correctly, though that is only testing the not logged in example.

 From what I have seen so far, I would guess that the wiki is sometimes 
encoding its http response as UTF-8 and other times as some single-byte 
encoding like ISOLATIN1 but it is still declaring that it is UTF-8.

I don't have the source code of the wiki or access to the server to test 
further though.

Someone please confirm the behaviour I'm seeing.  I hope my diagnosis will 
help fix it.

(On a tangent, I suggest declaring the encoding using uppercase "UTF-8" and 
not lowercase "utf-8" as the server currently is doing; I don't think this 
is the cause of the problem but it might be technically incorrect, unless 
those things are officially case-insensitive.)

Thank you. -- Darren Duncan



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