How is it that Jabber clients can send greek characters to other Jabber
clients and they display nicely? They do, somehow.
But when I try to get my perl script to send a greek character to a
Jabber server (and I believe I've tried everything everything under the
sun - details below), all I get on my Jabber client is weird accented
characters from the upper 8859-1 charset.
Here's what I tried, and you'll see the paradox:
Using a windows jabber client's raw XML entry (from an admin account), I
wrote:
SENT: <message to="192.168.1.100/announce/motd"><body>Ya sou (but in
greek letters)</body></message>
This makes the client show an announcement in perfectly readable Greek
characters.
However when I asked my Perl script to send the exact same command (with
"Ya sou" written both in ISO-GREEK and in UTF-8, two cases), then only
accented western european vowels appeared in the notification. In the
ISO-GREEK case, I got the same number of western accented letters as the
number of greek letters in Ya sou, in the UTF-8 case, I got double the
western letters.
This seems rather strange... because if during Pandion's raw XML entry,
the letters of "Ya sou" were sent neither in ISO-GREEK nor in UTF-8,
then how WERE they sent?
[Pause]
I just read a bit of the core XMPP protocol, it says an
xml:lang='language-code' attribute should be used right after connection...
I'm using the Net::Jabber library for my Perl scripts. Could it be that
the library doesn't use xml:lang? (I have no way to check) Even if so, I
tried including an xml:lang='el' (that's the symbol for greek) attribute
in the <message> tag that Perl sends, and that didn't change a thing
(even though according to the core XMPP protocol it should have worked,
if that were the problem) neither with the UTF-8 version of the string
nor the ISO-GREEK one.
What do you think might be going on?
I could send you a trimmed version of the script if you need.
Many thanks,
John
