Forum OpenACS Q&A: How do I change the character set encoding of my catalog files?

Hi,

I'm working on a database whose character set was recently changed to UTF8. I had a bit of a job correcting some messed-up data, but I've managed to do it. Now I want to regenerate my catalog files, but when I run "export to catalog files", the files are called package-key.locale.ISO-8859-1.xml and they all have encoding="ISO-8859-1" at the top of the xml file. I've changed the character set of the locale to UTF8 and restarted AOLserver. What else can I do?

thanks.
Brian

Brian, the character set of the catalog file should be fine as iso-8859-1 (it will be converted properly to utf-8 when inserted in the db). The reasoning for having those in iso-8859-1 was that most people editing them directly are probably using iso-8859-1 (or -15 or something close) rather than utf-8 so were less likely to mess them up and insert a character in the wrong encoding).

The translation server for example runs utf-8 but still spits out iso-8859-1 catalog files.

You would need to change the code if you wanted to have utf-8 catalog files for all locales (and then you could not merge changes from the translation server or newer openacs releases as easily).

If there is a good reason to switch all catalog files to utf-8 its pretty easy; just make the case...

Thanks Jeff. No, I don't really want UTF-8 catalog files, I just assumed they had to be in that format and wasn't sure how to convert them.
Thanks for the clarification.