Comments on: branch large support

By: Tagore Smith

Tagore Smith — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 17:21:40 +0000

Ack, I missed the comment right above this one pointing out the same thing about the name. Sorry about that.

By: Tagore Smith

Tagore Smith — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 16:32:05 +0000

It can be quite difficult to translate without the context- for example what if someone asked you what “American Brown” meant? Hard to say. But in fact “American” is a (very rare) first name (most famously, there is a well known game programmer named American McGee).

I’m going to guess that that is what is going on here. The second two Kanji are an obscure way of writing the given name Hiroshi or Hiroki. Really obscure , I think. I don’t want to get into an explanation of reading Japanese names- let’s just say it can be really tricky. There are some laws in place in Japan now to try to make it a bit easier, but people born before those laws went into effect can have extremely hard to read names.

If you can give the context you found this in it might be possible to make a better guess.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 01:08:54 +0000

Are you quite certain it’s a Japanese phrase and not a Chinese one? Googling it (which I’m sure you’ve tried) gives a document from Taiwan’s forestry bureau as the only result.

If it is Japanese, it might be a name. The first kanji would be the family name (pronounced Eda or Shige) and the latter two would be the given name (Hiroshi or Hiroki). In fact, given that Google knows next to squat about it, I’d guess it’s the name of a rather undistinguished individual.

By: Will

Will — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:47:27 +0000

What’s the context in which you found those kanji?

My Nelson dictionary doesn’t have an entry for that exact compound, but based on the kanji definitions I’m seeing, I think it may be an aphorism about branching branches or some-such. The first refers to a small branch or twig. The second is “big”, and the third is also a kanji meaning “branch”. (The “support” definition comes from the verb sasaeru, which uses the same kanji).

By: Steven Den Beste

Steven Den Beste — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 18:38:28 +0000

OK, Another try: Sugar’s name is ちっちゃな雪使いシュガー

By: Steven Den Beste

Steven Den Beste — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 18:17:47 +0000

Well, THAT was interesting.

WordPress database error: [Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '=']

By: Steven Den Beste

Steven Den Beste — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 18:16:25 +0000

Just as a test, let’s try some new kanji, to see if the problem is fixed going forward. The Japanese name for the “Sugar” series is ????????????

By: Steven Den Beste

Steven Den Beste — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 18:14:57 +0000

One of the suggestions from Ask Mefi seemed to imply that it is all those “latin1″ entries which are the problem.

It would be interesting to know what Don’s installation says in all those values. I bet a lot of those “latin1″ entries are “utf8″ in his installation.

By: fledgling otaku

fledgling otaku — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 17:56:41 +0000

I’ve been looking through the support threads at the WordPress Codex and I found a bunch of stuff about UTF-8 issues. I tried “this solution”:http://wordpress.org/support/topic/102555, and it seemed to have an effect in that it has changed how the kanji is wrongly rendered. But still wrong.

However since the concensus seems to be that the issue is a database problem. Here are some details:

bq. MySQL – 5.0.24a-standard-log
MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
MySQL connection collation: utf8_unicode_ci

*Server variables and settings:*

bq. character set client utf8
(Global value) latin1
character set connection utf8
(Global value) latin1
character set database latin1
character set filesystem binary
character set results utf8
(Global value) latin1
character set server latin1
character set system utf8
character sets dir /data/mysql/maddie/share/mysql/charsets/
collation connection utf8_unicode_ci
(Global value) latin1_swedish_ci
collation database latin1_swedish_ci
collation server latin1_swedish_ci

By: Steven Den Beste

Steven Den Beste — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 06:32:38 +0000

I didn’t realize it! If you look at the raw source, the individual garble characters are all ampersand-name-semicolon indications, which means that WordPress is actively converting the binary values into escaped names for the garble text we’re seeing. It isn’t allowing the binary values through, which would permit the browser to recognize UTF-8 encoding and display them properly.

That explains a lot. It makes me think that the one page which talked about “Latin-1″ encoding in the database is probably on the right track.