# Character Encodings

The omega CGI assumes that text in the database is encoded as UTF-8.

If you are writing your own search form, it is best to ensure that the query will be sent as UTF-8. By default, web browsers will send the form parameters with the same encoding as the page the form is on (and the default encoding for HTML pages is ISO-8859-1). You can override this by adding the parameter accept-charset="UTF-8" to the <form> tag of your search form (and it's safe to do this even in a page which is explicitly UTF-8).

If the form parameters get sent as ISO-8859-1, there are several issues:

The first is that characters which aren't representable in ISO-8859-1 get sent as numeric HTML entities, such as &#25991;. But there's no way to distinguish these from the same text literally entered into the form by the user.

The second is that Omega can't simply re-encode the form data as the encoding used isn't specified in the form submission (whether that is by GET or POST).

If Xapian is asked to parse a query string which isn't valid UTF-8, it will fall-back to handling it as ISO-8859-1, which will usually do the right thing for queries which are representable in ISO-8859-1. However, things like boolean filters in B parameters will be used as-is, so any which contain non-ASCII characters won't work properly.

# omindex

When using omindex to index, this should automatically be the case - omindex converts text extracted from documents to UTF-8 if it isn't already in this encoding. There's built-in code to handle the following: ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15, WINDOWS-1252, CP-1252, UTF-16, UCS-2, UTF-16BE, UCS-2BE, UTF-16LE, UCS-2LE. And if built with iconv, many other encodings can be handled.

For plain text, omindex looks for a Byte Order Mark (BOM) to recognise UTF-8, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32BE and UTF-32LE. Otherwise files are assumed to be UTF-8, or ISO-8859-1 if they contain byte sequences which aren't valid UTF-8.

When omindex builds URLs, it percent-encodes bytes according to RFC-3986. On modern systems, filenames are usually encoded in UTF-8, and the bytes which make up multi-byte UTF-8 sequences will get encoded. In Omega 1.2.21 or 1.3.3 and later, the OmegaScript $prettyurl command will reverse this encoding for valid UTF-8 sequences, and so filenames should be shown with only the bare minimum of characters escaped.

However, if your filenames aren't encoded in UTF-8, $prettyurl will leave alone percent-encoded bytes for non-ASCII characters (it is possible it could find a valid UTF-8 sequence in other data and so show the wrong character, but this is unlikely in real-world data). Everything should still work at least.

# scriptindex

When using scriptindex, you should ensure that text you feed to scriptindex is UTF-8.