Problem with Swedish letters Å, Ö, Ä

[jolappel]

I have been using XAMPP 1.7.7 lite on Windows 7 64bit without any trouble until now when I need to develop a website having letters with diacritics in its domain name (precisely Swedish Å, Ä, Ö).

I have a Wordpress website located here:
"C:\Users\Katz\Documents\xampp\htdocs\www.köpakläderpånätet.com"

When I try to run it - http://localhost/www.köpakläderpånätet.com/ - I have the following error all the time:

Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required 'C:/Users/Katz/Documents/xampp/htdocs/www.köpakläderpånätet.com/index.php' (include_path='.;\Users\Katz\Documents\xampp\php\PEAR') in Unknown on line 0

However, when I rename the website folder replacing all the "Swedish" letters with those without diacritics (i.e. www.kopakladerpanatet.com) everything works as it should.

Could anyone explain what I should do to make the special letters work? I would appreciate your help.

[Altrea]

Apache and MySQL can handle Unicode letters, but the problem is php. php is not yet able to handle full unicode.
Please follow the recommendation to just use "general" letters (a-z), numbers and underscores, no special or language related chars.

Full Unicode support for PHP is planned for PHP 6, but first PHP 5.4 will be released.

[JonB]

I'd like to 'butt-in" with this comment;

If the site is any thing other than a purely personal thing, although it may seem very cool to have a URL with diacritics, its a really poor design idea. Surprisingly, the real problem is effectively mechanical and lies with keyboards and language sets. Your URL will be "not happening" in more places than it will work. I think a stronger case can be made for Chinese (that's a tangled web) Greek, Cyrillic, Japanese, Arabic and Hebrew URL's. Additionally, there are lots of things that don't work right with UTF-8, its not only PHP. My primary contract work is on a fully internationalized database in four languages (two with diacritical characters). Our design incorporates not only the interfaces, but language specific text data and table/field labels for everything. I keep 'that' on a ml.xxxxx.org host (for multilingual) We also maintain 4 language specific hosts with WordPress, and a global language-preference cookie system. I can't tell you how many hidden traps there are. Lets not even talk about SEO considerations, LOL.

BTW - The best browsers for multilingual work - Google, Opera, IE (surprise, eh?)

Of course, it's still a personal choice, and this is 'my' opinion only.

Good Luck

[jolappel]

Altrea, JonB,

Thanks for your exhaustive explanations. There's also an option to use two letters instead of that with diacritics such as: ae - ä, oe - ö, aa - å, but sometimes such domain names look awkward.