What state is UTF-8 in now?

[Webbstre]

I've been hanging around here for a while now, and I've seen a lot of mentioning with UTF-8 having problems in VB4. My question is, what exactly is wrong with it? If UTF-8 (and thus posting in multiple languages) doesn't work correctly there's no way I can run the site I want to.

[Webbstre]

24 hours have passed... time for a bump!

Seriously though, with all the people saying how UTF-8 had bugs I'm surprised no one is here explaining what they are.

[kyrgyz]

Obviously they are working on it. I doubt it's of any priority for vBulletin though.

Read this thread: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...rade-from-3-8x

[Webbstre]

Obviously they are working on it. I doubt it's of any priority for vBulletin though.

Read this thread: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...rade-from-3-8x

Thanks, but I apparently don't have permissions. If I click on the link it says I can't read it.

[kyrgyz]

Sorry... it's in Licensed Customer Feedback forum. I'll just quote below what then General Manager said about UTF-8 support.

We've been told repeatedly that it is "tricky" or "impossible" to convert a database to UTF-8. Obviously this is going to have to change...

UTF-8 conversions are indeed tricky, as it involves not just the database but the entire application stack. We did quite a lot of work toward the goal of full UTF-8 support, however there is still more work to be done and 4.0.0 will not fully support it. (The features page has been updated accordingly.) UTF-8 support still is on the architectural roadmap for the 4.x series, however.

Dated 10/21/2009

[Webbstre]

Thank you. I guess I'll just have to wait for that before I work on my new site. Fortunately my gaming site is just English, so no delay there.

[Webbstre]

Ok, 4.0.1 Patch note:

• [Language Support] Additional Charset Support

Does that mean all foreign character sets are now supported?

[unleash]

I think you misunderstood the UTF-8 problem they are talking about, it's all about storing the data in the database meaning it have nothing to do with displaying non English characters, in other words you can use vb even vb4 in any language you want with no problems, i currently use vb4 in my Arabic site www.farrfasha.com with no problems.

[sami simo]

I think you misunderstood the UTF-8 problem they are talking about, it's all about storing the data in the database meaning it have nothing to do with displaying non English characters, in other words you can use vb even vb4 in any language you want with no problems, i currently use vb4 in my Arabic site www.farrfasha.com with no problems.

Well, this is probably not correct

If you activate CMS in your forum , you will possibly see that URLs can not be displayed in Arabic .

[Webbstre]

I'm glad someone finally explained exactly what the problem is. If there is a way to turn off non-romanized letters (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc) for the URLs then I shouldn't have any problems at all. I'm going to us CMS, so are there options to bypass having those characters show up in the URL?

[alessai]

I'm glad someone finally explained exactly what the problem is. If there is a way to turn off non-romanized letters (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc) for the URLs then I shouldn't have any problems at all. I'm going to us CMS, so are there options to bypass having those characters show up in the URL?

if you have a utf-8 database and u upgraded to 4.0 u wont have any problems even with links i dont use CMS but it might be true that the CMS links screws up a little (only cms links, forum and blog is perfectly fine)....

if you are not interested in permalinks then you dont have anything to worry about

[Webbstre]

As long as I can choose my own permalinks (Date and a keyword is best) then I'll have what I need. I assume that is possible, since even Wordpress can do it?

[alessai]

As long as I can choose my own permalinks (Date and a keyword is best) then I'll have what I need. I assume that is possible, since even Wordpress can do it?

i dont think you can do that,

• Standard URLs:
  showthread.php?t=12345
• Basic Friendly URLs:
  showthread.php?1234-Thread-Title
• Advanced Friendly URLs:
  showthread.php/1234-Thread-Title
• Mod Rewrite Friendly URLs:
  threads/1234-Thread-Title

this feature is really new to vb and was implemented just in this version, to have much much more control you will need to use an addon called VBSeo a paid addon, i think by time free ones will show up for vb4

[AlexanderT]

URL-rewriting is not the only issue when it comes to supporting UTF-8. Other issues, related to string operations, still remain. For instance, vB's core uses outdated functions for counting a string's number of characters, assuming that every character is one byte long.

Obviously they are working on it. I doubt it's of any priority for vBulletin though.

Are they? Really? Do you have any indication of that? Once they'd be working on it, I would expect UTF-8 support to be introduced any time soon. It's not like they'd be reinventing the wheel. vB is the last application on my servers that does not support UTF-8...

[RadioErewan]

URL rewriting is not most important part of the problem. At last, it can be disabled.