The site I am working on intends to teach Spanish online. The language lessons offered are different from all practices online in that they copy the classroom simple situations.
But on entering the Product/Lessons description the PayPal site rejects Spanish words by changing all accents and ñ´s into queer symbols.
I cannot use English words and cannot omit accents or ñ´s because the clients will be receiving the mistaken forms of what they intend to learn.
From the very beginning, everything written should be in Spanish. I hope to continue working with PayPal but should solve this issue. Any suggestions?
12 Comments »
+1
-0
Try changing your browser encoding when entering the descriptions? I don’t use PayPal so can’t be sure exactly where you’re encoutnering the problem. PayPal uses UTF-8 encoding - try checking that your browser is set to UTF-8?
Alternatively, perhaps your lessons could be saved in .pdf format and delivered as downloadables?
+1
-0
Thanks for the mail.
Perhaps I haven’t understood correctly, but it seems that your customers pay to download the lessons?
In which case it would seem unlikely that the lesson content would be subject to the same encoding problem.
As the rest of your item description is in English, could you not keep the word ‘Lesson’ in English as well? Surely this would not affect the product content?
+1
-0
From the screenshot, although it is not the full screen, it looks like the checkout page of 2CO rather than PayPal?
Can you give us a link to your site?
+0
-0
Okay, all is clear now. That’s not the PayPal page, that’s 2Checkout.
Some possible solutions:
Let me know if this helps.
+0
-0
I have made a request to our developers to add browser encoding to our Order Page.
+0
-1
hahaha…. hold on, let me do that again
3. I don’t know if this will work exactly with the 2CO interface, but try entering the word “Lección” as “Lección” (copy and paste from here)
4. If 3 works, you can get ñ’s by entering ñ
+1
-0
3 and 4 are still not working properly
basically, the HTML code for ó is & # 2 4 3 ; (remove spaces)
and for ñ it is & # 2 4 1 ;
+1
-0
Experiment:
ñ+1
-0
https://www.2checkout.com/checkout/purchase has UTF-8 encoding and the letters show up just fine
Come on 2CO, let’s have some characters encoded? 
+1
-0
But it displays wrongly in the ‘products in cart’ window, even with UTF-8. How odd!
+0
-0
For any bystanders - I’m not talking to myself, I’m responding to emails from laescuela
I can see what’s happening - that’s fairly standard for the HTML code to be converted to ‘real’ characters and not display properly.
That means the only remaining option I can suggest is to use English in the product name and description in the 2CO system until 2CO takes a look at its page encoding.
2CO staff are in the US, so it will be later in the evening when they discover our (my) entertaining exchange with myself
+0
-0
Hello bobs12 and laescuela. We are currently reviewing our purchase pages and our administration pages and I will be making recommendations to our developers to have all our pages encoded correctly so Spanish and other foreign language vendors will not see the characters changed. We are also working on purchase page translations and have some examples listed in this article. These translated purchase pages will display foreign characters. Our development team is working on finishing up the translations and we will be sure to post here when they become available.
laescuela - If you wish to open a support ticket with our technical support team here we can review your site and may be able to make some recommendations to you regarding this issue.