May I ask for an expert's opinion on a problem with "Search" and "Advanced Search" results in Greek please? I'll explain the problem below:

My site Athens Collectibles is fully bi-lingual, in English and Greek and one can switch between the two languages by clicking on the relative flag in the header. I started with Zen Cart version 1.3.9d and upgraded to the current version 1.5.0 in steps as each new version was released. Upgrades were done manually as per each version's readme files.

My host is Bluehost and from the cPanel I get the following information:

Apache version 2.2.22
PHP version 5.2.17
MySQL version 5.1.63-community-log

My database collation for all tables is utf8_general_ci and I expected it to be "case insensitive" as it is desired. However (and here is the problem), it is case insesitive in English but not in Greek. If one wants to test it, switch to Greek (there is no need to speak the language) and enter the word χατζιδάκις as the search string. It will give zero results because the first letter is lowercase. If you enter Χατζιδάκις (i.e. with a capital first letter), it gives proper results.

This is not the case with the English search, where hadjidakis, Hadjidakis, HADJIDAKIS or even hAdJiDaKiS are all treated as case insensitive and produce the same result.

Another issue that may have to do with the above is that Greek strings entered in product info page appear as hieroglyphics in the database but correctly on the web pages. For example, the products_name field for http://www.athenscollectibles.com/in...products_id=84 appears as

Μάνος Χατζιδάκις: Τα Μεγάλα Έργα του [σετ των 22 CD]

in the database but correctly as

Μάνος Χατζιδάκις: Τα Μεγάλα Έργα του [σετ των 22 CD]

in the product details page.

Needless to say that it appears correctly everywhere in English.

I have read a number of previous posts on this issue and all that was suggested was to change the collation to utf8_general_ci which I have already done.

Some settings in my includes/languages/my_template/greek.php that might help in identifying the problem are:

@setlocale(LC_TIME, 'el_GR.UTF-8');
define('CHARSET', 'utf-8');

They look OK to me, but I would be prepared to change something if suggested.

Any help will be really appreciated, even a hint as to what I should look for. I am keen to experiment as long as I have a clue.

Many thanks in advance and wishe for a nice evening to all.