# Displaying foreign characters - best practices?
**URL:** https://forum.kirupa.com/t/displaying-foreign-characters-best-practices/264114
**Category:** flash
**Created:** [June 23, 2008, 11:03am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/displaying-foreign-characters-best-practices/264114 "2008-06-23T11:03:35Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Zaid\_W1red](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/Zaid_W1red)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2008, 11:03am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/displaying-foreign-characters-best-practices/264114/1 "2008-06-23T11:03:35Z")
Hi Guys,
I’ve got a client that needs to display some icelandic characters in there flash application.
The application is updated by a cms using php - and the data is sent as a simple data string (as apposed to XML).
Here’s an example string: Sæglópur
Now this saves into the database fine, and outputs to the web browser fine with a heading of ‘text/plain’.
When loaded into flash the content doesnt display at all however - and when traced I get ‘?’ in diamonds where the foreign characters should be appearing.
Is the some list of best practices or anyone with some experience in tis that can help?
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### Author:  [@randomagain](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/randomagain)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2008, 11:46am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/displaying-foreign-characters-best-practices/264114/2 "2008-06-23T11:46:24Z")
you have to embed latin and latin extended formats into all the dynamic textfields
capitals
lowercase
fullstops etc
it bumps your file size up but enables different than english font.
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### Author:  [@Zaid\_W1red](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/Zaid_W1red)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2008, 3:12pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/displaying-foreign-characters-best-practices/264114/3 "2008-06-23T15:12:29Z")
yup done that.
if my foreign characters are hard coded into the flash this works great - but its breaks when they’re dynamically loaded ☹
Any clues?
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### Author:  [@randomagain](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/randomagain)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2008, 3:38pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/displaying-foreign-characters-best-practices/264114/4 "2008-06-23T15:38:52Z")
I’ve made an app which loads text in through XML and it works with French and the like so 😜
I can only assume its due to it being PHP, maybe you have to turn it to a string() even though its suppose to be one _shrugs_
I was of the understand PHP can write XML
I’ll ask a guy I know.
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### Author:  [@Zaid\_W1red](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/Zaid_W1red)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2008, 4:17pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/displaying-foreign-characters-best-practices/264114/5 "2008-06-23T16:17:48Z")
PHP definitely can write XML - but the app is to advanced to make a change as substantial as using XML instead of strings at this point.
I’m sure its some kind of character encoding issue but im just not sure ☹
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### Author:  [@actionAction](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/actionAction)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2008, 6:26pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/displaying-foreign-characters-best-practices/264114/6 "2008-06-23T18:26:51Z")
Set your external documents encoding to utf-8