Unicode Chinese characters

April 11, 2004 12:03 AM

[MT question] My blog is configured to publish in Unicode. I frequently use Chinese characters in my posts. The posts are published just fine, but when I go to edit a post, what comes up aren't the Chinese characters, but rather the Unicode coding for the characters. Is there some way to configure MT so that when I edit an older post, I can see the characters instead of the Unicode coding?

I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens with Japanese/Korean/Arabic/Summerian.
posted by alidarbac to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

(This is not meant to be snarky but) have you tried the Movable Type Forums? The user base is extremely active and extremely international. If MT can't handle the conversions completely I'd bet someone has written a plugin to help.
posted by bcwinters at 7:01 AM on April 11, 2004

If this is in regard to the blog linked in your profile, when I check the source for the page, it's charset=iso-8859-1, not utf-8. Thus, my question is did you edit your mt.cfg file AND uncomment the lines to show:

PublishCharset utf-8
and
NoHTMLEntities 1
and also put utf-8 encoding at the top of all your templates?
posted by planetkyoto at 7:41 AM on April 11, 2004

Just as a lagniappe to planetkyoto's correct advice--MT's current default templates include a special "MTPublishCharset" tag that probably already appears in your headers--if that's there, you don't need to change it.

It's the NoHTMLEntities line that "de-escapes" the unicode and makes it editable. It will not, however, fix old entries (I don't think), so to fix them, the thing to do would be view the text as published, copy it, and paste it into the MT editing window.
posted by adamrice at 12:41 PM on April 11, 2004