for some reason i am thinking about to change the charset setting for my board to utf-8 (so i can use the google news RSS feeds...)

unfortunately this isn´t that easy as it sounds to be... i filed a support ticket and discussed my matter with bfarber in detail (again, thank you, brandon!)

the problem i have is, that all former postings would need to be converted since they have been submitted in iso-8859-1 standart. so if i´d just switch the general board settings to utf-8 all of the old postings are getting messed up (some special german characters "Umlaute" are not mapped properly because there are no equivalent characters).

i´d like to know, which charset is "the best choise". it seems to me that UTF-8 has some advantages, because it it supports characters from a wide range of languages. am i right?

what might be the reason, that IPS is using iso-8859-1 in their support forums but UTF-8 in IPDynamic generated websites (IPS customer Center)?

ISO-8859-1 is a subset of UTF-8.

MySQL didn't support utf-8 until version 4.1, so make sure you are at least running that version.

If your Web site is in English, it makes no difference whether you use UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1, as every word in english will use characeters from the 8859-1 subset.

to me, the exact opposite would be your porblem--- converting FROM utf-8 to iso-9959-1

have you done testing on this to determine the mapping problem, or is this just a guess?

My Forum had to change tp UTF-8 reason being if we used iso-8859-1 all our posted scripts in tutorials were displaying in weird characters. Had a support ticket in last year with IPB on this as they just started changing and our mySQL version never changed, just one of those weird things.

yes, i am on mysql 4.1.7

that´s the problem. the default language is english but about 50% of my members are using a german language pack.

yes, i have tested that. all possible settings.

You will have the same problem with german language packs with utf8 if they are not written in utf8.

I have also english as default but i changed every "Umlaut" in the german language files like this

ä replaced by ä
Ä replaced by Ä

rest you can read here http://de.selfhtml.org/navigation/suche/in...anfrage=umlaute

@ckoebke
thank you very much for this hint!

how did you edit / 'convert' the german language files? one by one using a simple standard editor?

Yes one by one and i only use vi as editor (still the best).