Degree sign (UTF-8) for widget unit

[oscar-b]

When setting up a regular feedvalue widget for temperature, I tried using ° as unit which didn't work.

It seems as if emoncms isn't prepared for UTF-8? Seems like a strange decision, what's the reason for this?

Either way, changing the encoding of DB table dashboard to UTF-8 (why is cp1252/latin1 used?), and changing the mysqli connection charset to UTF-8 does the trick (except saving the dashboard to the DB).

[TrystanLea]

Hello Oscar. I had just used default db table encoding, no specific decision was made really. Table encoding isnt something I know much about, i guess there may some implications to changing it? I havent looked into it. Its possible to do get a degree sign though with the html notation ° as the output of the units field for a dial or feedvalue is rendered html. Is that sufficient?
Trystan

[oscar-b]

Hi

I'm not sure if changing encoding of existing installations poses any problems, I'm guessing that converting to UTF-8 should be fairly safe, but I don't know.

Generally speaking, trying to use UTF-8 for everything will probably save you some internationalization headaches later on, but using old school html notation is probably enough in this case :)

/O

[oscar-b]

Hmm, just tried entering ° as unit here, and it doesn't work, it just outputs it in plain text. Does that work for you?

[oscar-b]

Some information about changing collation:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/742205/mysql-alter-table-collation

[lafrech]

It actually is annoying. Not only the degree sign is missing. Accentuated characters are lost as well.

Is there any objection to moving to UTF-8 ? What would be the best procedure ?

[TrystanLea]

Looks like alter table <some_table> convert to character set utf8 collate utf8_unicode_ci; would do it and I guess we would need to specify utf8 in the table builder. - It might be worth missing making any changes to the new class-y :) emoncms implementation https://github.com/emoncms/emoncms_framework

I'm just completing the conversion of the input module at the moment so will soon be ready for a big update to the main emoncms repository.

[oscar-b]

@TrystanLea Has it been resolved?