Ecommerce Templates > General Help > Character sets

Using Wide Character Sets like Chinese, Japanese, Korean.

Using wide or multi-byte character sets can be quite complicated but hopefully we have simplified things somewhat. To enable support for these languages you will need to decide what character set you wish to use. UTF-8 is a popular choice so we’ll use that as our example.

You will need to set this character set for use in admin pages and in your emails. To do this, add the following to your vsadmin/includes.asp

emailencoding="UTF-8"
adminencoding="UTF-8"

....or in includes.php

$emailencoding="UTF-8";
$adminencoding="UTF-8";

You will also need to use HTML emails as standard text emails will not cope with the wide characters so add this to vsadmin/includes.asp

htmlemails=TRUE

...or to vsadmin/includes.php

$htmlemails=TRUE;

Finally you will probably need to set the codepage for use with your character set. The codepage to use with UTF-8 characters is 65001 so you may also need to add this line to your vsadmin/includes.asp file…

session.codepage=65001

That entry is not always required so do try with and without it.

PayPal is a popular choice as it provides checkout support for Chinese for instance. There are a couple of parameters that can help when using PayPal. Firstly you can set the PayPal “lc” variable to set the locale. This example would set the checkout locale to Taiwan…

paypallc="TW"

or

$paypallc="TW";

And also, you can set the “charset” so that PayPal will correctly interpret your wide character product information in the correct character set. Here again, the example is for UTF-8 in vsadmin/includes.asp

payprovextraparams1="<input type=""hidden"" name=""charset"" value=""UTF-8"" />"

or in vsadmin/includes.php

$payprovextraparams1="<input type=""hidden"" name=""charset"" value=""UTF-8"" />";

Quick tip

Typically when you make changes to the language file you make those in languagefile_en.asp or .php which is fine but that would get overwritten by updaters. It's a good idea to rename that file to something like languagefile_jp.asp or .php and then in your store pages for the ASP version change the line

<!--#include file="vsadmin/inc/languagefile.asp"-->

...to this...

<!--#include file="vsadmin/inc/languagefile_jp.asp"-->

or for the PHP version

<?php include "vsadmin/inc/languagefile.php" ?>

... to this ...

<?php include "vsadmin/inc/languagefile_jp.php" ?>

When new updaters come out the new entries are added to the top of the languagefile so it's easy to see which new entries have been added when you update and those can be translated and added to your new file.