Foreign language characters gone funny
Hi there,
I'm not sure whats happened to my ZC site. But for the last couple weeks or so anyone who has registered with non english charcters in their address, the non standard characters are showing up as a bunch of nonsense symbols. ( or for that matter anyone who has changed shipping address with non standard characters.) This wasnt an issue before, the only thing i can think of that has changed was the server where I am hosted was upgraded recently. (and i really doubt that would cause this ..)
For non standard characters i mean things like the A with a little "o" over the top. The german SS that looks like a B with a tail. Plus other accents from international languages.
Any clues or ideas?
Thanks
Re: Foreign language characters gone funny
Bump - help would be appreciated
Re: Foreign language characters gone funny
I have the same problem and I havn't been able to find an answer. This is something Zen Cart should look into. It seems there are many of us with this situation.
Re: Foreign language characters gone funny
Your shop uses the data stored in your database and the text written in the language defines to construct a html page and send it to your browser.
In the <head> of the page is information telling the browser what character set encoding is being used for the bits and bytes so it can display them correctly.
For example
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /
or
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
If the characters from the database (the names and addresses) are displaying wrongly then they have a different encoding from what is stated at the top of the page.
Try changing the encoding in the browser and you will see the characters being displayed correctly, maybe.
Now my knowledge gets sketchy, but I imagine the problem revolves around the characters going into the database and being encoded with a different character set to how your page is encoded.
I don't want to expose more of my half-baked understanding of the issues, which ARE complex once you start searching, hopefully someone more knowledgeable will continue this, is it possible that a wrong collation on the database could do this?
Another potential issue regarding characters is if the server is windows or unix, but this is to do with using the language and country functions of the host server, I don't think it is related to your problems.
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=133111
regards
Steve