Google API's results with special characters (acute accents)

[dirson]

Hello.

I succeeded in doing some searches with the Google API.

But I would like to search words with acute accents (in French or Spanish), and show results also with these special characters.

I tried changing 'ie' and 'oe' values into 'iso-8859-1' or 'latin1', but spanish words are not recognized and I get extrange results ('Español').

Does anybody have any experience?

Thank you very much.

[troels nybo nielsen]

Google works excellently with the special danish letters, æ, ø and å. And I just searched on España and Rhône. The results arrived immediately, and the letters were perfect.

[Tropical Island]

We have just gone through such a problem with two of our sites.

First we mistakenly created our main Spanish entry page as www.oursite.com/español.htm. We were on MS servers so there was no problem for people to follow this link. We did however notice that while the rest of the site was getting a 4/10 or 5/10 PR this page was greyed out. It was obvious that Google couldn't handle it. We created a new page as /espanol.htm and left the original for those that were still looking for it. The PR on the new page is now 5/10 and is now listed in Google.

The next problem occurred when we then were forced to switch from MS servers to Linux servers (a change I really like). Unfortunately Linux does NOT recognise special characters so anyone trying to reach /español.htm got a 404 page. Linux is also case sensitive and we discovered that Google had listed our links to some pages all in lower case whereas the page was partially in caps. This also produced 404 pages.

In summary I would strongly suggest that you refrain from using these types of characters in your extensions as it will only bring you grief.

[dirson]

Thank you very much for your answers, but my doubts are dealing with _GOOGLE_API_

I'm using Perl+SOAP::Lite, and I'm not able to search with special characters (español, acción, française, tête, ..)

I do not know if the solution is changing the values of 'ie' and 'oe' (in 'doGoogleSearch').

[troels nybo nielsen]

Ooops! Sorry for being too fast on the trigger and not reading your question properly. What tricked me was partially the experience, that some search engines (not Google) are unable to handle the special scandinavian letters.