Putting Japanese text on a mixed-language page

how? and how to keep my server from killing it?

[berli]

I have two problems:

1. On English language pages, I'd like to mix in some Japanese. Apparently the only way to do this is to use character entities. I've found the character entities for hiragana and katakana, but can't find any such table for kanji. Sometimes if I enter kanji into a Google search bar they will come back as character entities in the results page, but this doesn't seem like a foolproof method. Any suggestions?

2. For Japanese pages, or any pages with non ASCII characters (this includes German and French special characters), is there any way to keep one's server from farking it up? I tend to use online editors (cPanel comes with one, GeoCities offers this as well) but they inevitably read through the page and convert character entities into characters. Then, when the user wants the page, incorrect characters or "?" come back. This is really, really annoying. Is my only recourse to go back to editing pages offline with a text editor and uploading with ftp?

[tedster]

I've sent out a request for more informed help than I can give you on this -- let's hope the cavalry arrives soon.

In the mean time, here is one related thread:

Saving Foreign Characters into the database [webmasterworld.com]

<edited for bad speeling>

[edited by: tedster at 3:56 am (utc) on Sep. 4, 2003]

[Jingle]

Why don't you use UTF-8 encoding? [unicode.org...]

I think that's the best way to display different languages on the same page.

Google uses UTF-8, so the search result can contain multiple languages.

[takagi]

You can use 'Shift_JIS' for Japanese with or without some English. However Unicode is the best solution for mixed Japanese and non-Japanese text if the non-Japanese also contains non-ASCII (like accented letters, Arabic, Korean, etc).

As for the result page showing weird characters, on Internet Explorer go to "View >> Encode" and select the right encoding (Unicode, Shift-JIS, EUC, etc). I presume you have the right fonts installed. If not, search for Input Method Editor (IME) on Google.

[berli]

takagi: The weird thing is, I can mostly get around that problem by going to Advanced Language Tools in Google, but while it will accept my hiragana and kanji, it seems to hate katakana for some reason.

[takagi]

What happens if you go to www.google.co.jp instead of the .com?

How do you enter the katakana? You have some special application where you enter it, and then copy/paste the text? Or do you enter the katakana directly on the page?