When Browsing the contents of a Controlled Vocabulary, characters with diacritics are incorrect
Symptom
- In CONTENTdm Administration when browsing a Controlled Vocabulary, characters with diacritical marks appear incorrect
Applies to
- CONTENTdm
Resolution
CONTENTdm supports UTF-8 encoded characters within metadata fields, and most browsers will open the Controlled Vocabulary list with ANSI encoding within the browser. Saving this page as a plaintext file will automatically encode it as UTF-8, and the characters will appear correct both within the downloaded file and within metadata fields.
Many browsers can update the text display encoding in some way. As an example, Firefox is one OCLC-recommended browser for use with CONTENTdm, and the process to update this view follows:
- In Firefox click through Menu > More Tools > Customize Toolbar
- Add button for Repair Text Encoding
- Open CDM Admin
- Go to Collections tab > Fields > select the desired collection
- Click edit for metadata field with Controlled Vocabulary
- Administer controlled vocabulary
- Browse the defined vocabulary for this field
- In the new tab that opens, click the new button for Repair Text Encoding
Google Chrome, Safari, and Microsoft Edge all have options for the same.
Additional Information
If the characters in the downloaded file do not appear to be correct, the metadata entered into the Controlled Vocabulary contains unsupported characters. Exporting the metadata for the collection and reviewing the necessary fields within the XML file will show which of the characters need to be updated in both record metadata and in the Controlled Vocabulary.