Thread

I’ve noticed that in some cases, sending messages from the Communicate form in languages that use double-byte characters (I’ve been using this with Japanese, but I imagine it might occur with Chinese, Korean, etc., as well) results in garbled characters.

I think this might be limited to cases where the Word Wrapping option is set to On, but I’m not entirely certain.

Can someone confirm whether there is something about the way mail is sent from the Communicate form that might corrupt messages written in languages that use double-byte characters?

As an example of what I mean, a message that should look something like this:

この日本語の文字列は普通に表記されています。

Ends up being sent out to our members looking more like this:

陸æ‘˙管ç∆∫姉儡äπ˚ã≠√ã≠…å¿∞ã™—ã≠≈ã™…ç¤πã≠‚牓㙘丅㙂ã™≤ã™˙ã•≠

Please let me know if anything can be done to prevent this from occurring!

Thank you!

Hi Garden-variety Fool,

I just tested this and I was able to successfully send myself email in Japanese and Korean with no garbely goop. I also had set the word wrap option to on.

When I manually changed my browser encoding to Western (ISO-8859-1) The body of the email was sent successfully but the title field had errors - different from yours but still errors.

Two things come to mind - possibly browser error for one. The second error would be your database charset being off. Could you check and confirm that it is set to UTF-8?

Sean

Thanks for the response, Sean.

One of the things that is difficult about troubleshooting this problem is that it seems to happen unpredictably. Some messages go through without problems, but others get garbled.

Also, I’m not usually the one sending the messages that get garbled (I’m reporting this on behalf of a number of other users of this particular site), so I cannot say for sure that browser encoding is definitely not a factor, but the people involved are generally pretty tech-savvy, so it seems unlikely that something like browser encoding would be causing this.

UTF-8 is the charset set in the config file, and there are no problems displaying Japanese content on the site itself. This issue occurs only with messages sent.

When you sent your test messages, did you try sending both Japanese and English in the same message? The messages where this has occurred have all been bilingual.

Hi Garden-variety Fool,

I just tested again with the text below and successfully received the mail. Is this occurring in all browsers and on both Mac/PC? What version of ExpressionEngine are you on?

この日本語の文字列は普通に表記されています。

한국말 할수 있나요?

English here

Thank you for your continuing support on this issue.

I’ll see what I can find out about the browsers/OS in use when this occurs, but I’m pretty sure it is a relatively recent version of Windows (Vista or 7 or similar) with the latest version of whichever browser.

Incidentally, what are you using? I ask because although the Japanese and Korean characters appear correctly in this thread, this is what arrived in my inbox in the notification message:

この日本語の文字列は普通に表記されています。

한국말 할수 있나요?

English here

This is precisely the kind of thing we are seeing in outbound messages, and it seems to happen with forum notifications as well, which suggests to me that the problem lies in how EE handles these characters in e-mail rather than a user-side problem.

Hi Garden-variety Fool,

I’m on windows 7, fully updated, I tested in both FF and Chrome latest versions. I have forum notifications turned off, but have subscribed to this thread now. If you could reply to this thread with some double-byte text that would be great as I could then see if it renders correctly for me.

What email client are you using? if you check your email in your client and a web based one such as gmail are they both garbled?

Sean