Bug 124431

Summary: kopete replaces umlauts with weird characters
Product: [Unmaintained] kopete Reporter: baum-im-wald
Component: ICQ and AIM PluginsAssignee: Kopete Developers <kopete-bugs-null>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE    
Severity: normal    
Priority: NOR    
Version First Reported In: SVN   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: openSUSE   
OS: All   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description baum-im-wald 2006-03-28 18:11:35 UTC 
Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.5.0)
Installed from:    SuSE RPMs
OS:                Linux

I updated to 0.12 beta2 yesterday and since then the following characters (at least) are not displayed correctly in (at least) contact tooltips and chat windows:
Ä ä Ö ö Ü ü ß
They are replaced with chinese-looking characters:
酹 媠 etc.
Comment 1 Olivier Goffart 2006-03-31 13:46:34 UTC 
we need to know exactly where there are such problem.
which protocol. which field.  and it could be nice to know your contact's client.

A screenshot could be nice too visualise the problem
Comment 2 Bartosz Fabianowski 2006-03-31 22:00:07 UTC 
This is a result of the wrong encoding being used. Selection of a default encoding was never implemented for ICQ and all contacts just randomly use "Big5", the encoding with the smallest internal ID. That's why you get Chinese characters.

To work around the problem, you need to manually select "ISO-8859-1 Western" encoding for *each* and every contact using German umlauts.

When you open the encoding selection dialog for a contact, you will see that "ISO-8859-1 Western" is already selected. Don't be fooled. No encoding is selected and "ISO-8859-1 Western" is only shown because it happens to be first in the list used in this dialog. You need to select any other encoding, close the dialog, reopen it, select "ISO-8859-1 Western" and then, finally, the selection will stick.

It's really a nuisance and probably rather easy to implement, but real life has caught up with me way too much to be able to look into it myself.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 123486 ***