Hi. Does it mean we shouldn't work with France, Germany, Spain, Norway, Nederlands... ? What you call special characters are just normal characters all over the world.
Asked by Laurent Le Meaux:

*This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: [_Special Characters in Page and Attachment Names](https://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=704577890)*

Hi. Does it mean we shouldn't work with France, Germany, Spain, Norway, Nederlands... ? What you call special characters are just normal characters all over the world.


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: "Special characters" is not peculiar to Atlassian, they're defined by the whole computing industry, and are a bit of a hangover from the times when **every** bit counted.   

When you've only got a baseline of 127 characters to work with, then once you've dealt with control characters, punctuation, numbers and two cases for the 26 characters that are common to the languages most people work in, you're pretty much out of space, and have to define less-common ones as "special".

Nowadays, yes, we have more computing power and bandwidth, so they're not a problem in theory, but we've still got all the old stuff and standards have been set.

comments: author: Laurent Le Meaux
body: Thanks for your answer.

In fact, I'm totally aware of that. I've been working with computers for a while now. But...

Again, does it mean we shouldn't work with those countries? Writing a text without accent in France will make it barely readable.

Same thing for the titles. I'm currently trying to use an include macro which just stopped recently to work when we updated to a newer version. Just because of the accents in titles.

So the advice "please avoid using special characters" is not acceptable. I mean... if you want to make money with other countries than US, UK, NZ, Australia...

I don't know if you're a programmer or what, but if you are, please test all your programs with "special" characters.

And correct this issue : [https://support.atlassian.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/30/PS-7450.](https://support.atlassian.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/30/PS-7450)

thanks

regards,

L.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: It's not my code. And what code there is is limited by html and programming languages.

I'm not suggesting you don't work with other countries, Confluence has a huge market across many countries, including significant and rapidly growing ones in areas that don't use roman-like characters at all, and it works well in all of them (Right to left writing is a bigger problem than characters in urls from what I've seen). It's a weakness, but it's really nothing that should stop you, and it's a bigger weakness in a LOT of other software I've seen.  

There's a limitation in the way urls work that makes special characters hard to work with and even harder to code around. There's nothing I can do about it. It's also mostly limited to the url, the body of your pages is not affected by it.


author: Laurent Le Meaux
body: Ok, thanks a lot for your time. I understand your point, but still, writing without accent is a mispelling in France and is very bad considered

Anyway, just wanted to complain because I've got hundred of pages to update now...

Have a good day

L.


Tags: documentation