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NaSMail and Turkish translation issues

Turks have different character case conversion rules. These rules can cause lots of issues, if programmers use locale dependent string functions and assume standard English case conversion rules. This document tries to cover issues that you might have, if you use NaSMail or SquirrelMail in Turkish translation. Similar problems can happen in Azerbaijani and Kurdish translations.

If PHP scripts are executed in Turkish system locale, it might break scripts or PHP interpreter itself. Issues are not common in older Unix systems because they don't have correct Turkish translation tables. Linux systems have better i18n support and it breaks things with PHP and strtolower/strtoupper/strcasecmp functions. NaSMail and SquirrelMail have workarounds for Turkish translation, but NaSMail developers can deliberately disable those workarounds in NaSMail development versions in order to make sure that interface is coded correctly.

Here goes the list of common issues.

PHP and case insensitive function names

Older PHP versions use locale dependent string comparison in function names. You got stuck with it, if you get Fatal error: Call to undefined function: quoteımap() in /some-path/functions/imap_general.php on line xxx error.

Possible fix:

• Make sure that all function calls are written in lowercase or upgrade PHP to 4.3.0+ or later version. PHP developers fixed function name issues in 4.3.0.

Charset name conversion to upper case in PHP scripts

Some scripts might call strtoupper on character set name before using it in IMAP SEARCH, SORT or THREAD queries. You got stuck with it, if you get İSO-8859-9 charset is not supported error.

Possible fixes:

• Don't use php --with-gettext. But then you lose in performance.
• run localedef tr_TR -i en_US -f ISO-8859-9. This command creates bogus Turkish locale. You would be breaking the rules, but it removes the problem.
• If you can't change system locale, make sure that LC_CTYPE is set to C in functions/i18n.php. SquirrelMail does it in 1.4.2 and later versions. NaSMail might disable setlocale(LC_CTYPE,'C') calls with two slashes. Fix breaks case insensitive searches, because system starts using non-Turkish character case conversion rules. It also breaks all translations that don't set gettext codeset with bind_textdomain_codeset() function call. In NaSMail translations must be initialized with custom NaSMail functions that set codeset correctly. In SquirrelMail it requires custom code similar to the one used in set_up_language() function.
• NaSMail also includes functions that can be used to do locale independent string case conversions. If you find code that uses strtoupper, strtolower or other locale dependent function, when English conversion rules are expected - inform about it NaSMail developers.

White pages instead of SquirrelMail login page

It can happen with some IE version. IE does not like one header that is send by SquirrelMail scripts. I don't know IE version, but I have information that upgrade fixed the problem.

PHP bugs

List of PHP bugs that might affect Turkish translation in NaSMail.

• 16865 - Issue can break scripts that use variables or functions written in upper case. Should be solved in PHP 4.3.
• 35050 - Breaks uppercase classes and methods. Other reports on same issue - 18556, 35583, 40086, 42526. See patch.
• 39993 - NaSMail breaks with white screen on fatal date_default_timezone_get() error. Error message about time zone database corruption is suppressed because code is blocking E_STRICT notices generated in same function call. Affected PHP versions - 5.1.0 - 5.2.0 (tested 5.2.0 and 5.2.1rc2-dev).