UTF-8 Characters in Text Fields

[shivoomiess]

As European organisations, it would be nice to allow UTF-8 characters. Currently, we are removing these characters in the Proposal Abstract text field to prevent certain legacy downstream problems with non-ASCII characters.

[yoganandaness]

To add more on the context, special characters like å, ø, which are essential to write multi lingual abstracts are currently not possible with the current validation rules.

[yoganandaness]

@ellen-wright Your thoughts about this?

[ellen-wright]

Absolutely, we should definitely expand the characters allowed, the reason the abstract is sanitized currently is some of our downstream systems didn't allow hidden control characters UserOfficeProject/issue-tracker#1370, if we can find a way to remove these problematic characters and allow special characters like å, ø then all should be good

[shivoomiess]

unfortunately, control sequences are an essential part of the UTF-8 spec and this same issue exists with other character sets that enable multi-language support.

[ellen-wright]

I will speak with the team that deals with the downstream system that had the issue and see if there is something we can do