What language is this?

[Solfius]

I have met a non-english character, but I think the character encoding is wrong, so all I get is mixed up symbols.

Can anyone identify the language?

Cze¶æ

this word seems to be mostly right, if you can identify the language, do you know what encoding I should use. I'm browsing with firefox if that makes a difference

[sanchez]

It's Polish. But it's not displaying properly for me either, in FF. The last two characters should look like 's' and 'c' with little diacritics on top. The word means 'Hi'.

[marol]

(...) do you know what encoding I should use. I'm browsing with firefox if that makes a difference

Appropriate encoding is ISO-8859-2 (Central European). The word should be visible as 'Cześć'.

[Solfius]

Thanks, I guessed the meaning from the context

after some experimentation: Central European (ISO) seems to make it look right, but there are other notes that still look wrong

eg a note called "Ęŕđňŕ (1077)-"

the date is obvious, but I've never seen that many special characters in a single word before, is it possibly a diferent language again?

[marol]

There's no valid Polish word made up with only special characters. It could be Russian or Chinese (less probably). You can also open main Cantr page and try to switch languages to see the effect.

[sanchez]

The eth looks wrong. No Cantr language uses that, afaik.

[Solfius]

Perhaps Russian, do you know what encoding I ought to use for that?

Is there a wiki page with this on? if not perhaps there should be

[marol]

Sorry, I don't know.

Unfortunately when Cantr arose Unicode standard wasn't enough popular, therefore game code didn't specify any default encoding. So the deciding factor in most cases was the client browser and its default settings. Text written with particular encoding is hardly readable by people that use other encodings (or is completely unreadable in some cases).

Even worse - in some countries there are more than one encoding standard in use, so that problem occures even for single language texts.

There are plans/proposals of converting Cantr database to Unicode, which would solve all that problems. However it would need overhelming amount of work - proper encoding of every single note, name or speech would have to be estimated and then converted.

[Solfius]

hopefully there's a way to ensure everything from this point forwards is unicode, it can be difficult enough interacting with non-english chars without trying to get their messages to display properly

[wichita]

We're aware of the Unicode issue and would like to get it taken care of. Some extra help from folks who know how to program would be nice.

[marol]

hopefully there's a way to ensure everything from this point forwards is unicode, it can be difficult enough interacting with non-english chars without trying to get their messages to display properly

We can not switch to Unicode now without bothering with older stuff - in example all notes made before switching point would become unreadable. We have to convert them all first.

[pipok]

There's no valid Polish word made up with only special characters.

żółć (eng. 'bile') - 'small z, dot above' + 'small o, acute accent' + 'small l, stroke' + 'small c, acute accent'

[pipok]

eg a note called "Ęŕđňŕ (1077)-"

the date is obvious, but I've never seen that many special characters in a single word before, is it possibly a diferent language again?

It's Russian, in Windows-1251, the word is 'карта' (lat.transcr.: 'karta') and means 'a map'.

[marol]

The first pipok's post does not change anything in this matter.

[pipok]

The first pipok's post does not change anything in this matter.

Right, it doesn't. Relax, I'm not against you, marol. Just a comment.