About character encoding

In general we use the multibyte character encoding UTF-8 as default encoding with the follwing consequences:

• The $AC->settings->encoding is 'utf-8' unless overriden in autocomplete_config.php

• The text.php is saved as UTF-8
• The css file uses '@charset "utf-8";'

• $AC->settings->capitals is utf-8 encoded

• In ajax.php we utf-8 encode the query string if $AC->settings->encoding is utf-8 and the charset of content_type is not utf-8 (means the request is sent in a non-utf-8 type)

We have to support other encodings like iso-8859-1 because some collections are not utf-8 encoded. The default encoding can be overriden by $config->encoding in the autocomplete_config.php.

To handle non-utf-8 encoding we do the following:

• the page encoding of index.php, options.php and change_options.php is determined by $AC->settings->encoding

( <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=<?php echo $AC->settings->encoding; ?>"> )

• Texts from text.php are utf-8 decoded by $AC->get_text()

• The way to write the javascript code in function javascript_rhs (in generate_javascript.php) depends on encoding: if no utf encoding is given the javascript is generated url encoded (this is not necessary if utf-8 is used)

• We use mb_strtolower (instead of strtolower) with parameter $AC->settings->encoding to enable utf-8

UTF-8 lowercase in PHP (23May07 Markus)

Requires extension mbstring (for functions like mb_strtolower). Following line required in php.ini

In windows:
extension=php_mbstring.dll

or in linux:
extension=php_mbstring.so

(On geek, the mb_... functions were available by default, on Markus's laptop the line above had to be added.)

Texts in text.php are now UTF-8 encoded (23May07 Markus)