I’ve felt guilty for a long time for not supporting non-English characters in Clicky. It’s been requested by many, many people, and I’m very pleased to announce that we should be fully UTF8 compliant as of now. Please let me know if you are still seeing any character weirdness in Clicky. As far as I can tell, it’s all working great!
This will really only affect stats going forward… some old data was converted successfully but mostly we weren’t even storing foreign characters at all, they were just being stripped out. The reason for this is because I’ve previously experienced some nasty database corruption when dealing with these characters, and it was just easier initially to strip them out and not worry about it.
This task is NOT EASY. Anyone who is a web developer, or perhaps another type of programmer, might know the pains involved with getting this working. It is an absolute nightmare to make your application work right with non-standard characters. I’m posting a few links to articles on why this is so difficult, so if you have the time to read them then hopefully you will be able to forgive me for taking so long to implement this 🙂 But seriously, I’m really happy to finally have this available to you, so enjoy!
CD Baby developer talking about “one of the most difficult and tedious problems I’ve ever solved” (hint: that would be UTF8):
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/01/turning_mysql_data_in_latin1_t.html
An insanely thorough article on all the issues surrounding UTF8:
http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/charsets
A thread on MySQL going over everything necessary for PHP/MySQL to play nice together with UTF8:
http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/182505
