Collecting data in Hindi and Nepali

Support
1

I have a form set up in 3 languages; English, Hindi and Nepali.

Can I check, has anyone collected data that is in Hindi (or Nepali) that uses a different alphabet? i.e. Just text data.

My phone that I use to test the forms is from the UK and does not have a Hindi or Nepali keyboard as far as I can see but the phone bought abroad for the study may well have them.

It is fine for the data to be recorded in these languages. I just don't want to start getting back on the server and find that it is corrupted or can't be viewed.

Any comments would be appreciated.

2

Hi Stuart,

do you have configured the database with UTF8 character set?

for mysql the my.ini for example

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/charset-applications.html

3

The server we use is the normal Google server with, I presume, the defaults that came with the software.

If it was set up for UTF8, would that be a good thing?

4

I'm pretty sure that App Engine supports UTF-8 out of the box.

To confirm, try sending accented characters (å,é,ü) and emoji (:clipboard:,:bar_chart:) and see if those work. If they do, Hindi will probably be fine.

5

I see here in the documentation that this should be configured.
I found also other post about it:

6

It was some time ago -- but I collected a survey in Hindi, Nepali, and Bengali in 2013 using Nexus 7 tablets on the (at the time) most up-to-date version of Android. I'm not sure what version of ODK Collect or Aggregate I had running, but it worked flawlessly as long as the input was made in the .xlsx form using unicode software.

I did run into issues in Myanmar in 2014 when using older devices that were not updated to recent versions of Android. These could not read the unicode Burmese script, but newer versions of android could. I haven't seen this issue replicated in recent past (and have been using ODK across Asian countries with different script).

Edit: I'm happy to answer any other questions you have; but my primary recommendation is just to test test test if you are concerned. We did use our own devices, and they did not have script keyboards installed (all questions where select_one/multiple etc, so no open ended -- or they were instructed input using native keyboard).

2 Likes
7

Thanks a lot Lloyd and everyone else.

These have answered my question