User name search in CP

[Merjawy]

Hi there
I have asked this at vB.com and Stave said maybe I could find help here

I admin several international forums some are multilingual

user names are writen in different lanugages

everything works fine even user search in the forums, but in admin cp I can not find Arabic names

thats been tested on pure english vB or fully translated vB

why no Arabic names show in my cp search? I get no users found no matter what I search for but names in latin letters are found

not that I am worried about it.. just made me think more for a fix if any already out there or can be done

Thanks

[Xenon]

Steve told ya to ask here?

sounds like a bug to me, so vb.com would have been right as you post first

i don't really know the arabic name system, but maybe the problem is because of the strtolower function in user.php

try to open admin/user.php
find this

" AND INSTR(LCASE(username),'".addslashes(strtolower(htmlspecialchars($ausername)))."')>0"

and replace it with this (code from memberlist.php)

" AND username LIKE '%".addslashes(htmlspecialchars($ausername))."%' "

[Logician]

I cant give you cure but a suggestion:
If I were you I would force the users to use english letters while choosing their usernames. You can do it by restricting arabic letter chars in your vb settings.

You may regard the bug trivial considering the fact that it only effects Admin CP user find section, but IMO it can give you much more headaches than this on the long run. If this causes problem, I'm sure many Admin CP related codes can cause more problems. Eg. Your updating counters, chaning user details, restoring a back up etc.

I guess your best bet is to restrict Arabic letters in usernames.. My 2 cents..

Xenon: Actually we cant consider this a bug since vb is officialy claimed to works in English language only. Well it works in many language as we all know, but when problems like these occurs, we cant blaim them much as they warned in the begining.

[Xenon]

Logician is right, this bug can produce more errors in ACP...

@Pal: yes, i know, but when vb3 should support more languages they should know that such a "bug" already exists

[Chris M]

So are you saying that we should ban characters that are not latin characters?

Satan

[Logician]

Originally posted by hellsatan
So are you saying that we should ban characters that are not latin characters?

Actually I didn't say that.

Technical explanation is long, here is a recap: Different languages reside in different encodings. Most of the encodings are sort of "compatible" with "English" encoding. For example in Turkish encoding if you write letter A, it will be displayed as letter A in English encoding too since their ASCII Codes will be same. The difference of Turkish encoding would be using some special ASCII codes for Turkish letters and these would be assigned to less frequently used chars of English encoding and wouldnt clash with the basic ones.

However if you are using a completely different alphabet like Arabic, Korean, Chinese or Japanese, the number of different letters are so much that they will invade even the basic letters of english char set like A B C D etc. Then problems can begin if the script didnt think about this possibility.

For example if an arabic letter invades the place of backslash \ or $ sign in english char set, the script can regard it as a backslash or $ and try to escape it with "addslashes" command.

Well this was suppose to be recap I guess you get the gist.

[Merjawy]

thnx guys.. I am not sure at this point how to go about it.. restricting names is somewhat out of the question as everything is really in Arabic. As for the letters and mixing up with \ or $ I don't see how as they totaly seprate sets and I have not seen anything of the sort. (not that I am an expert in that) but I can say one thing about that... sometime (I mean rarely) someone would post and all looks fine till he/she saves it.. and the title becomes greeck !!! garbage, but very rare that happens

and I think that happens sometimes if key compnation is used in the first letter of the title like shift key and a letter
cuz in Arabic, Shift makes a differnt letter (somethin on top of the letter) as supposed to english upper or lower case of the same letter


I don't know.. you scaring me with this now I hope vB3 can handle it better