# Qt4 : disappearing non-English characters

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/qt4-disappearing-non-english-characters/179990>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [December 9, 2009, 10:07am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/qt4-disappearing-non-english-characters/179990 "2009-12-09T10:07:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mikedc55](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/54ee81/32.png) [@mikedc55](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mikedc55)\
**Post date:** [December 9, 2009, 10:07am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/qt4-disappearing-non-english-characters/179990/1 "2009-12-09T10:07:54Z")

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I’m developing a flash-card application to help myself learn the Chinese  
language. I’m using ruby1.8 with Qt4 on an xubuntu system.

At first, everything is rendered correctly, but after displaying a  
certain number of flash cards, the non-English characters in the updated  
windows  
in the GUI are not rendered to the screen. For example, if there is  
word, such as, “bXn”, where X is a non-English character, then it is  
displayed  
in the GUI as “bn”, i.e. the middle, non-English, character is totally  
skipped.

For reference, I dump the words to a command-line terminal, and the  
non-English words/characters are displayed correctly.

The problem is consistent in that for a given input flash-card database  
file, the non-English characters disappear at a certain number of  
flash-cards (the  
flash-cards are displayed randomly, so it is not associated with  
specific cards).

The larger the flash-card database, the sooner the non-English  
characters disappear. The flash-card database is a simple UTF-8 plain  
text file.

I’m guessing that it is a memory-related problem in Qt or the  
Qt/Ruby-binding, but am unsure how to debug it.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Mike