French and German Characters

French and German Characters

av William Purcell -
Antal svar: 6

When I try to add/edit a resource inputting French or German characters such as an umlaut or schwa, it results in a COULD NOT CREATE/UPDATE RESOURCE error. This occurs whether I import text from an external editor (such as Word) or if I use the Special Character set on the internal HTML editor's menu bar. Has anyone else encountered this problem or know a solution?

We have the full language package that came with the original Moodle installation file, and I cannot find any settings in the Configuration menues that might be relevent to this.

Help would be greatly appreciated.

bill purcell

Nanzan University

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Re: French and German Characters

av Art Lader -
Hi, Bill,

Do you know which version of Moodle you are using? Is it one of the 1.6 beta versions?

Regards,
Art
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Re: French and German Characters

av William Purcell -
Hi, Art.

We are using the 1.5.3 stable version. Ours is a new site, just installed 10 days ago. We have no problems with either English or (ironically?) Japanese kanji characters. I have a German and French colleague very eager to use the site. Any hints would be most welcome.

Regards,

bill
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Re: French and German Characters

av Art Lader -
Hmmm... I am using 1.5.3 and we are not seeing this behavior. There is hope! leende

Have you tried using keyboard shortcuts like alt + 129 to get ü and alt 144t to get É (on a PC)? That's what we do in German and French. See http://www.vistawide.com/languages/typing_foreign_language_characters.htm

Might be worth a try until this is cleared up.

-- Art
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Re: French and German Characters

av William Purcell -
Thanks for the hint, Art, but it didn't work. I can get the characters on the screen, but every attempt to save the file results in a COULD NOT UPDATE/CREATE error. This happens whether I am creating/updating a Text or HTML page, or a summary page.

One suggestion from someone else was to upgrade French and German to the UTF-8 language packs. However, I was also warned that it would create havoc with the system while fine-tuning. Yet another suggestion was to upgrade the whole system to Moodle 1.6. But since that is not yet stable and, because I am a novice, I'd rather wait.

Eventually we will probably have to do one of the above, but for the interim if anyone else has a suggestion, I'm all ears.

Thanks for your time and thoughts,

bill
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Re: French and German Characters

av Michael Goncharenko -

Preved William,

Tell what server software you are using (OS, apache, mysql, ldap?)

For example, mysql since version 4.1 supports charsets and there's "latin1" set by default. Also, you should look at your server's error log and turn debug mode on to make moodle be more verbose.

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Re: French and German Characters

av William Purcell -
Hi Michael,

I don't have all of the particulars here--I will need to get them from our computer department. I know it is running Apache2 (but what ver.?),  PostgreSQL (ver??), and I BELIEVE it is a Unix system.

I contacted the computer department, and they basically made the same suggestions you did earlier; viz. migrate to UTF8 or upgrade to Moodle 1.6, since that seems already to be unicoded. They also gave me the same warnings about the havoc migrating will cause.

Before attempting to migrate I am going to make an experimental installation of Moodle and then try migrating that one, just to see what will happen and how to counter any problems.

This is going to take time--and we've just started our new school year--not the best time to have this sort of problem.

thanks for your input. I will look into the rest of it (including changing the debugging settings.)

regards,

bill
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