Last updated January 13, 2010. Created by LeeHunter on June 9, 2004.
Edited by Heine, ronald_istos, Steven, sepeck. Log in to edit this page.
Several people have asked how to specify the character encoding that Drupal uses. The short answer is: you can't.
Drupal uses UTF-8 for encoding all its data. This is a Unicode encoding, so it can contain data in any language. You no longer need to worry about language specific encodings for your website (such as Big5, GB2312, Windows-1251 or 1256, ...). Also, when Drupal imports external XML data (such as RSS or XML-RPC), it is automatically converted into UTF-8 (iconv support for PHP will be required for most encodings).
If you really want to change Drupal's encoding, you will experience a lot of troubles, because of the various ways Drupal can receive and send out data (web, e-mail, RSS, XML-RPC, etc).
Comments
Encoding of the underlying DB?
Hi
Nice explanation of why there 's no need to fuss with Drupal's character encoding, but what about the underlying data?
For example, if I'm using mySQL v5.5 and I want to support French accented characters, shouldn't I use 'default character set utf8 default collate utf8_general_ci' (as described in http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-unicode-sets.html) when I create the database?
Just wonderin',
TIA
Gary
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Victoria, BC
Canada