BlogCFC and Windows Live Writer 2009 issues with UTF-8

Posted by Dan on Mar 4, 2009 @ 9:54 AM

I just noticed an issue with BlogCFC and Live Writer 2009. If you read my blog at all, you may have noticed I use the em dash a ton. For some reason I'm drawn to using the em dashes and ellipses.

Anyway, I just noticed that Live Writer does not translate the em dash character to an HTML entity (—), but instead posts it as a character code. This would be all fine and dandy, but there seems to be an issue posting this character as UTF-8—which is the default character coding for Writer 2009.

The fix is to Blogs > Edit blog settings... > Advanced and changed the Character Set to "Western European (Windows): Windows-1252" from the "Default (UTF-8)" setting.

 image

I'm not sure if this issue goes away if you use the HTML markup type, but I prefer the cleaner XHTML (and it works better with my BlogCFC modded XMLRPC script.

I'd prefer to keep using UTF-8, but until I can figure out how to fix the weird UTF-8 encoding issues, I'm sticking with this decoding.

Categories: Potpourri

5 Comments

  • Oğuz Demirkapı's Gravatar
    Oğuz Demirkapı
    What is your database?
  • Oğuz Demirkapı's Gravatar
    Oğuz Demirkapı
    Hmmmmmm.

    You have problem in general with Unicode. Writer has the right way and your blog and DB has the problem. Check my name. :)
  • Dan G. Switzer, II's Gravatar
    Dan G. Switzer, II
    Yeah, I haven't really done any unicode testing. I'm running MS-SQL, so I'm sure it's just a matter of changing the database type.

    However, Live Writer used to convert characters like this to HTML entities. I'll look at the database tomorrow.
  • Oğuz Demirkapı's Gravatar
    Oğuz Demirkapı
    Dan,

    You can first try to activate Unicode support in CF admin.

    On your DSN please activate following parameter in advance settings.

    "String Format         -- Enable High ASCII characters and Unicode for data sources configured for non-Latin characters"


    In normal conditions, it should solve your problem.
  • Dan G. Switzer, II's Gravatar
    Dan G. Switzer, II
    Changing the DSN setting appears to have fixed the problem. I guess I didn't pay close enough attention when setting things up.

    Thanks for the solution!

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