Supporting Bulgarian should be like any other language - Cyrillic definitely works with the KOI8-R character encoding for Russian (see CyrillicSupport), though Bulgarian may use a different character set. See the TWikiInstallationGuide for details.

UTF-8 is not yet recommended as it doesn't work as well in TWiki, but see ProposedUTF8SupportForI18N if you are interested in testing TWikiAlphaReleases that already have reasonable UTF-8 support.

-- RichardDonkin - 17 Feb 2004

The Bulgarian locale is bg_BG.CP1251. Unfortunately, this means that charset in Content-Type will be set to CP1251 too, but this name is not standard IANA charset, it's not even alias. The standard IANA name is windows-1251, so this should be used as charset.

-- OgnyanKulev - 07 Mar 2004

I recently encountered this problem of the locale charset not matching the IANA charset used by the web browser - there are two solutions:

1. Recommended but more complex option: upgrade to the latest TWikiBetaRelease and configure the new $siteCharsetOverride to windows-1251, overriding the normal locale-derived charset of CP1251. This release also supports UTF-8 URLs, so you no longer have to reconfigure all web browsers when using TWiki pages with Bulgarian names - see EncodeURLsWithUTF8, and note that you would need to install a couple of CPAN modules if you are not using Perl 5.8.
2. If you don't want to upgrade and don't need UTF-8 URLs: edit the TWiki.pm module in your current installation so that line 410 (the line before reads $siteCharset = $1 if defined $1;) reads:

$siteCharset = 'windows-1251';

This will then be picked up in the HTTP headers as well as the HTML templates (the former overrides the latter, so setting the %CHARSET% variable explicitly would not work.)

Presumably you are on Windows and expecting only Windows users, since even windows-1251 is a Microsoft extended character set that will probably not work so well with Mac, Linux or Unix users - if not, you would do better to use an ISO-8859-* or KOI8-* based charset, which may be more widely supported.

Let me know how you get on! Also, if you have a public TWiki site, it would be interesting to know the URL.

-- RichardDonkin - 09 Mar 2004

I'm using TWikiRelease01Feb2003 and I think the cleanest approach is using the non-standard locale bg_BG.KOI8-R. That's what I'm doing and it seems to work fine.

-- OgnyanKulev - 10 Mar 2004