Russian Language ASP Nightmare!
We are having difficulty making a site in ASP that is dual-language (Russian & English) where all translations are stored in a MySQL database.
We have used a UTF-8 encoding in the database table and it appears that the Russian characters are being stored in there correctly.
Only certain parts of ASP seem to have the ability to be able to deal with non-ASCII characters. Response.Write seems to be fine and so do the Request methods.
However, trying to get ASP to interect with a database in Russian using ADO seems to be problematic. When putting russian characters into the database it appears to try to put them in as ASCII, the database then just does not understand these and just displays a series of question marks.
When trying to retrieve the Russian characters from the database (after entering them directly using MySQL Query Browser), ASP is expecting ASCII therefore turns each UTF-8 character into multiple ASCII characters. Resulting in nonsense!
We have tried to set the charset and the CodePage of the ASP page to UTF-8, but this was of little help.
Response.Charset=”utf-8″
Response.CodePage=65001
We also sent the following to the MySQL database from the ASP page to inform it to send UTF-8 characters:
SET NAMES ‘utf8′;
We obviously also set the charset in the HTML of the page, but non of this enabled the russian characters to be correctly displayed.
We also tried changing the database and everything in the page to use the Cryillic (1251)character set, but still nothing!
We finally gave up using ASP (cursing about the ASP / ADO controllers) and Henry is now creating the site in ASP.NET which has much more support for non-ASCII character sets.
Michael.