UTF-8 Zen-Cart Tutorial for v1.3.x

Hi everyone!

I was removing all the countries I did not need from the countries and changed Spain to España so everything would be in spanish on my sitea fter that started to get a question mark symbol for the Ñ character in the registration form drop-down.

So I followed this steps to solve it:

1. I inserted España in the database, which lead me to an error in the purchase confirmation email, it displayed the ñ when inserting the country, but solved the registration form issue.

2. I deleted España from the countries table and added it again after changing the encoding of countries_name database field, and inserted it again.

3. I tried changing the encoding of the field to utf8_spanish_ci

4. Changed the whole database to UTF-8 from COLLATE in phpMyAdmin

6. I´ve created the file my_db_charset.php in /includes/extra_configures and also in admin/includes/extra_configures

7. I downloaded the database to my pc and using UltraEdit I changed all instance of latin1 to utf8, and utf8_latin_ci to utf8_spanish_ci

The rest of special characters in my site are displayed correctly. None of the above helped me....

The site is www.touchtoys.es and I´m running ZenCart 1.3.9d with a template from zencart-template

I´m stating to go crazy due to this error, any ideas where I might messed up or what am I missing?

Thanks for everything!

Quote:

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6. I´ve created the file my_db_charset.php in /includes/extra_configures and also in admin/includes/extra_configures

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How does España display in the country list in admin?

THANK YOU VERY MUCH TORVISTA!!!

I checked it in the country list, which was displayed with the same odd character. So I changed it there and solved the problem!

I own you a couple of beers and some tapas!!!

Point 6 was the key to ensure the character entered in admin got stored in the database as UTF-8.
You should delete or fix the accents on these two provinces too or you will not be able to check your validation.

[QUOTE
theForm.zone_id.options[2] = new Option("K�rnten", "99");

theForm.zone_id.options[1] = new Option("Baden W�rtemberg", "80");
[/QUOTE]

Nice site!

I just left three countries since we do not want to expand worldwide just now ;-)

Do I have to chance that as well? and where do I change that lines?

Thanks again for everything!

Hi, I'm looking for some advice regarding my tables.

I've converted my database as per the tutorial.
Now, when I create new tables in my databse, they use utf8_general_ci collation.
My existing tables (the ones created when I installed Zen Cart) are still showing latin1_swedish_ci.

Does this matter?
Should I convert the latin ones to utf8?
I tested converting 1 table from latin to utf8 and it doesn't seem to have broken anything but I did notice the columns in the table are still latin. I can convert the columns to utf-8 too if I need to.

I'd like to get everything to utf-8 but I don't know if doing it would break my cart?

Any advice would be appreciated guys

As for the tables and the overall database, if you change those settings then it will ensure that new columns added to those tables or new tables added to that database will use the new character set.

Converting the columns is what's important for your data, but if you do that without protecting the data inside those columns, you'll end up with corrupted data.

I'm not sure which tutorial you're talking about. There are about 10 different ideas tossed around in this thread by various people, with varying degrees of accuracy.

Thanks for the reply Dr Byte.
The tutorial I was referring to was the original one, in post #1.

I'm worried about corrupting data by converting tables so I may start by converting a couple of small tables and wait for a week or two and if there are no problems, do another couple of tables.
It will take a while but hopefully I won't screw anything up!

If you have any better ideas I'm all ears :)

Thanks again for your help

The help here worked great for me.
I've installed v1.3.9h like two weeks ago, the tutorial worked great to get Spanish language running.
Two small notes: Database was allready utf8 collation; also, query_factory.php comes with some logic to assign tf8, so no need to make this change:
//BOF changed for utf-8
mysql_query('SET NAMES "utf8"', $this->link);
//EOF changed for utf-8.

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Aside from that, to beginners like me I recommend making sure you work one language at a time, one file at a time -making a safe coopy of your original file-.
*****************
Finally, using View | Character Encoding to make sure you're encoding right from the start, was of great help to me.

Thank you so much !!

Carlos

Using the latest version of Zen Cart having updated from a previous version I ahve added French, German and Spanish. All works well except Spanish. However using the my_DB_charset setting to utf8 the Spanish is working OK.

Is it possible to introduce an if statement to the PHP file my_db_charset to just use the utf8 setting for Spanish ???

Yes I am new to this :lookaroun