Forum OpenACS Q&A: in OACS.5.2.3, how to get news notification safely?

1: in OACS.5.2.3, how to get news notification safely?

Posted by David Ghost on 03/04/07 12:50 PM

WHenever I register new news item,
I get notification through e-mail.
News item was composed by language other than English,
as a result my e-mail inbox gets dirty with
broken characters...
How to address this?
I tried in vain with the file (...AOLSERVER/modules/tcl/sendmail.tcl where I add one line "fconfigure $wfp -encoding utf-8", but it seems not work)
In summary
my question is how to handle e-mail notification encoding
in OACS.5.2.3?

2: Re: in OACS.5.2.3, how to get news notification safely? (response to 1)

Posted by Brian Fenton on 03/05/07 04:43 PM

Hi David,

what database are you running, Postgres or Oracle? What character set is your data stored on the database? Does the character set support the language you're using? You may need to set the correct character set in your AOLserver configuration file also. See here for more info:
http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=199029

Brian

3: Re: in OACS.5.2.3, how to get news notification safely? (response to 2)

Posted by David Ghost on 03/06/07 02:34 AM

My system runs on Postgres
I created db with "-E UNICODE.." switch
I don't know how to check Charset in Postgres.
My AOLServer config file has UTF-8 sets.

4: Re: in OACS.5.2.3, how to get news notification safely? (response to 3)

Posted by Brian Fenton on 03/08/07 12:58 PM

Hi David, that all sounds reasonable. In that case, you'll need to investigate further. I would first check that when you save the News items to the database, that they look ok (by using whatever Postgres' equivalent tool to SQL*Plus is). In Oracle there is a very useful function called DUMP which tells you exactly what is stored in each byte (which will then get displayed as characters according to the NLS_LANG environment variable) - I'm sure there must be something equivalent in Postgres. If the data looks fine at that stage, then I would look at the next step in the process, which seems to be the email sending. Look into how the email is generated, and how the data is pulled out of the database.

hope this helps,
Brian