Why are special characters not saving in my database?
By default, the back end of your Sumac database holds characters in a certain way. The choice of language that Sumac chooses to record these characters is called “encoding”.
Historically, Latin-1 encoding has been the best language to use for storing database information for English speaking clients. This is because Latin-1 uses up very little space, and is able to hold all letters and numbers in the Latin family. However, if you need to store data in languages that do not use Latin characters, Sumac’s default Latin -1 encoding may not able to handle the special characters that you need.
Certain clients may experience difficulty or errors when they are entering text into Sumac with non-Latin characters. In certain situations, these errors may arise even when there are no visible non-Latin characters, simply because the text was copied from somewhere else, then pasted into Sumac.
These special characters require a different encoding language, such as UTF-8. UTF-8 provides a wider variety of available characters. If you are running into the problem where Sumac is not saving data correctly because of the character encoding, we recommend choosing one of the following options:
- Instead of copy/pasting text into your database, type it into Sumac using only Latin characters. OR
- If you require the use of non-Latin characters, please let the Sumac Gurus know, and they can update the encoding for your database to UTF-8.
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