1.8 -> G2 Localization related troubles

[Покотиленко]

Hi.

Some time ago I was reporting a "Bug 310102" in 1.8. It's about not
correct display of non-English characters in reports.

I've been told that G2 port would solve this problem. Truly, in G2 I can
create accounts with Russian names and put transactions with Russian
descriptions and they appear correctly in reports.

But, when I finally got to open my 1.8 file in G2, it was a surprise.
Russian characters in accounts list, transaction list and reports
doesn't appear correctly.

I believe, the problem is in the way 1.8 saves file, but there should be
a kind of workaround to allow correction of a file during open or
import.

How I see the problem:

1. I see in Gnucash 1.8 file that non-English characters are being put
in "óÅ..." (Unicode I believe) form. This is the error entry
point.

When created and working with this file I was using KOI8-U locale.
GnuCache 1.8 doesn't consider locale when converting to Unicode. Russian
characters are from second part of KOI8-U charset, but resulting
"óÅ..." characters are from second part of iso8859-1 (Western
Europe) charset.

To conclude: GnuCache 1.8 when converting to Unicide always writes
characters as "Western Europe" not taking into account what charset the
characters are really from.

2. More details about this problem and a workaround for 1.8 reports
(which can help create import with correction of this problem) can be
found in "Bug 310102".

3. I think, that G2 should detect 1.8 files during open and propose
using of import routing which would ask user for a charset which was
used to create and work with file in 1.8, and convert characters, and
re-save file with correct Unicode characters.

-- 
Покотиленко Костик <casper at meteor.dp.ua>