Handling of files and data containing ® (registered trademark symbol)

[swguy]

Zen Cart does not handle this well right now. For instance, a ® symbol in a file in html_includes will yield this error when the defines pages editor is used from admin:

[09-Aug-2012 00:35:33 UTC] PHP Warning: htmlspecialchars(): Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in /var/www/html/mysite/myadmin/define_pages_editor.php on line 188

... and the define page is blank in admin (since the default behavior of htmlspecialchars is to return nothing in the event of an error.)

This can be resolved by using ENT_IGNORE in the htmlspecialchars call in admin/define_pages_editor.php line 194.

Of course, there are a number of htmlspecialchars calls ... and unfortunately a lot of the cart's descriptions contain the registered trademark symbol.

Any other suggestions?

[DrByte]

What PHP version?
What CHARSET and DB_CHARSET ?

[swguy]

PHP 5.3.10 (local) and 5.2.17 (on server);
CHARSET/DB_CHARSET utf8.

[DrByte]

I'm not seeing any such characters in a fresh 1.5.0 install.
And inserting ® via the admin, saving, re-opening, saving, re-opening, etc, doesn't trigger any problems here. PHP 5.3.3 on this particular site.

Did your files come from an older version, based on iso-8859-1 character set?

[swguy]

Yes. Add an ® to a file in html_includes/YOUR_TEMPLATE using a text editor, then try to open it from defines pages editor.

[DrByte]

Okay, when I use a text-editor and tell it to save the file as iso-8859-1 and add a multibyte character to it and save and then load it to my server and try to open it in Zen Cart which is set to UTF8, then I get the same problem.

And that's to be expected.

But if I set my editor to use UTF8 just like my Zen Cart is set to use UTF8, then I don't have any problem. And of course one should always use the same character-set / encoding consistently across all editing/storage platforms.