I had the need this week to update a whole range of international sites for a client of mine. This is the first time I have worked for this particular client, and things were going like a dream. I got the German site done, followed quickly by French, Italian, and Spanish. But then I hit the Japanese one…
Content to be updated was supplied in the form of a Word document, but copying and pasting from this in to the relevant html file simply did not work (as I had suspected, hence the saving them until last!).
Luckily, Pinyin.info came to my rescue with their online conversion tool for mandarin, katakana, hiragana script. It takes a string that you copy in to the tool and converts it to it’s Unicode equivalent.
This works fine for the Japanese site, as the Japanese language usually has only one symbol per word, so the code doesn’t become too unwieldy.
However, the Russian cyrillic alphabet is a different matter - even though the above site will convert cyrillic characters, a short sentence ends up churning out a massive amount of code.
So, back to the drawing board, and what else is out there to help? Eventually, I found this little gem: Character Set Converter
A freeware application, this beats any of the other tools down there - it will simply take a file in one encoding, and convert to another. In my case, I had the russian text saved as utf-8, and converted to win-1251 (which is the encoding type used on this site).
Phew!
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