Article title cut off at first advanced unicode character

Software Support
1

Describe the issue or problem
I want to save the article title. The article title contains unicode, specifically “:lizard: → :snake:”. Including these kinds of character in paper titles is increasingly common in our field, and I can’t see any serious arguments against doing so. When I enter the publication title in the Editorial workflow and click Save, only the text up to and excluding the first advanced character remains.

Steps I took leading up to the issue
For example:

  1. Go to an article’s title on the publication tab in the editorial workflow
  2. Adjust the title to “xxx :lizard: → :snake: yyy”
  3. Click save
  4. Only “xxx” remains

What application are you using?
OJS 3.3.0.13

2

Hi @leondz,

OJS itself is ready for advanced unicode, but your MySQL database and collation configuration may not be. Try searching this forum for utf8mb4 and you’ll find a few related threads.

There will be two elements involved in converting your database over to supporting advanced unicode:

  • Changing the config.inc.php file to support the right character set and collation. The new settings will be:
    • collation = utf8mb4_unicode_ci
    • connection_charset = utf8mb4
  • Converting your database; see e.g. this StackOverflow discussion.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team