Charset settings

[Fork]

I've been spending a lot more time with ZOOM lately (as you can probably tell from all the questions in the forum this past week) and I started getting a new error message yesterday.

Most of my site has a meta tag that specifies

charset=iso-8859-1

I chose that in the Languages pref in ZOOM and I got an error stating that the template doesn't match...now the error occurs no matter what I change it to in the long pop-up list. I can still index and I don't see any other problems at the moment.

What template does the error refer to? The search_template.html file?

The manual suggests using UTF-8 encoding and there is also a disable charset choice in Advanced.

How does the charset choices in prefs affect search and my site?

[David]

What template does the error refer to? The search_template.html file?

Correct. You generally want the template file to be in the same character set as the search results.

For example, imagine you had a template file that was in BIG-5 (Chinese). But the search results, which are presented inside the template, are generated in iso-8859-8 (Hebrew). The browser would display the Hebrew words using the Chinese character set. The result would a lots of garbage & corrupt characters on the search result page. In short, a mess.

If all of your site is iso-8859-1 (English/Latin) then just use this setting everywhere, including in the search_template.html file.

If you site uses a mix of languages on different pages, e.g. some Russian, Greek & Thai, in addition to English, then you'll need to use UTF-8 because UTF-8 is a character set that supports all languages. This is why we suggest UTF-8. It is a safe option for most sites. But the template file and Zoom still need to match (i.e. both set to UTF-.

The "Disable charset enforcing on search script" option on the advanced tab does the following. This option disables the search script’s attempt at specifying the charset via a HTTP header. This is done to ensure that the corresponding character set used for the encoding of the index data, is also used for the search page. However, if you are an advanced user trying to embed the search script within your own scripted pages, this extra HTTP header may not be required (as you may already have HTTP output before the search script is executed). In this case, you can safely disable this feature here. If this doesn't make sense, ignore the "Disable charset enforcing" option.