UTF-8 issues in Joomla 1.0.x series - a guid

Is there a workaround to apply utf-8 in Joomla 1.0.x series?
Yes. Here is a quick guideline to getting Joomla 1.0.x to work with utf-8
- use MySQL version 4.1.2 or newer (older versions don't support utf-8).
- create an empty database manually before installing Joomla. Set the character set to utf8 when creating with some collation (utf8_general_ci is the default and should be OK).
- convert the language files to utf-8 (all language files including for editors, components etc.). Make sure NOT to save with the utf-8 BOM header option.
- Install Joomla using the pre-existing database. After installation check that the database has utf8 encoding for all text fields (just in case Joomla created a new database and is not working on the pre-created one).
- set 'charset=utf-8' in the _ISO define in the language file
- You should uncomment one line of code in the includes/database.php file at about line 102 (second line below)

Code:

$this->_table_prefix = $table_prefix;
//@mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $this->_resource);    // THIS IS THE LINE TO UNCOMMENT
$this->_ticker = 0;
$this->_log = array();

Please note that the above does not make Joomla 1.0.x fully utf-8 compatible. All string functions will still be using singlebyte character functions. This works well in most cases (no guarantees). There will be some instances of garbage characters especially with diacritic Latin characters and logical error in searches and filtering features.

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