I'm solving a problem for a customer and I'm out of ideas....

Customer has English and Finnish language installed.

Database is using UTF8_GENERAL_CI
Language files are encoded with (as per default) ISO-8859-1 (english) and ISO-8859-15 (finnish) and these are set as the CHARSET define.

Now when the customer adds a product, the text is being truncated by the database on the first occurance of äÄöÖ or any other "non-english" character.

The text starting from the special letters just do not exist in the database.

Using phpMyAdmin I can enter these special characters to products_description without a problem.

And if I change the main language file (english.php or finnish.php) in the admin/includes/languages/ folder so that CHARSET is defined as UTF8 it starts to work and the special chars are written to the database.

This ofc breaks every special char in the admin side layout, so they show like "À" (because the language files are in ISO-8859-15). Also doing it like this ends up breaking the special chars in the catalog side too.

During my over 6 years career on working with zencart I have never come across this kind of sittuation where the database does not accept characters in different encoding at all.

Anyone has any solution to this?

I doubt my customer is willing to pay for me to convert all language files to UTF8.