Proper rendering of special characters in Flash, parsed from XML and generated with PHP/MySQL

Question

Hi all,

Probably a problem many of you have encountered some day earlier, but i'm having problems with rendering of special characters in Flash (as2 and as3).

So my question is: What is the proper and fool-proof way to display characters like ', ", ë, ä, etc in a flash textfield? The data is collected from a php generated xml file, with content retrieved from a SQL database.

I believe it has something to do with UTF-8 encoding of the retrieved database data (which i've tried already) but I have yet to find a solid solution.

Answer 1

I think that it's enough for you to put this in the xml head

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

Answer 2

Just setting the header to UTF-8 won't work, it's a bit like changing the covers on a book from english to french and expecting the contents to change with it.
What you need to to is to make sure your text is UTF-8 from beginning to end, store it as that in the database, if you can't do that, make sure you encode your output properly. If you get all those steps down it should all work just fine in flash, assuming you've got the proper glyphs embedded unless you're using a system font.

AS2 has a setting called useSystemCodepage, this may seem to solve the problem, but will likely make it break even more for users on different codepages, try to avoid this unless you're really sure of what you're doing.

Sometimes having those extra letters in your language actually helps ;)

Answer 3

If your special characters are a part of Unicode set (and they should be, otherwise you're basically on your own), you just need to ensure that the font you're using to render the text has all of the necessary glyphs, and that the database output produces proper unicode text.

Some fonts don't neccessarily include all the unicode glyphs, but only a subset of them (usually dropping international glyphs and special characters). Make sure the font has them (test the font out in a word processor, for example). Also, if you're using embedded fonts, be sure to embed all the characters you need to use.