Foreign Character Issues

[Miff]

I get a lot of international customers signing up on my cart as well as making regular orders. Depending on the language we get very strange symbols appearing leaving us with no clue on how to address packages. I immediately knew that this issue is caused by the pages charset of ISO-8859-1, whch I changed to the more universal UTF-8. This solved my problem but when using UTF-8 My pages now no longer display the £ symbol correctly !!! Is there a way around this so that all language characters and icons can be displayed or is this not possible..?

[torvista]

whch I changed to the more universal UTF-8

How exactly?

[Miff]

Well because UTF-8 shows all the strange international letters. When an international customer makes an order all there address details are full of strange icons so to be able to get the actual address I am having to change the relevant english.php file charset to UTF-8. I would leave it like that but then no £ symbol shows up. I am here for advice and information on how everyone else manages international customers addresses, especially French and other European countries

[maac2]

Unfortunately it takes more than just updating the language files. What you are doing there is telling the browser your data is stored in utf-8 which, from reading your post, it doesn't seem to be.
The major task is updating your database to utf-8, not a simple task, but search this forum for plenty of other threads to get an idea of what it involves.
Here is the general faq from zen cart: http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?...8859-1-to-utf8

[Miff]

Iv been building a new store for a while on my local server so once Im ready to replace my current site il make sure to look at it a little closer. Is UTF-8 the best option to go with or not? It does seem to resolve the issue of foreign characters, however as I previously mentioned, it seems to cause issues with the pound symbol.
Whilst setting up my original database I used all the default settings and did not notice any instructions regarding setting a specific charset so im guessing that this may be quite a common issue for Zen Cart users who make regular sales to international countries. Any support or info would be highly appreciated before I set up the db for my upcoming site.
Thank you.

[fonzie]

here's a tool to change the charset in your database
phoca.cz/documents/38-tools/154-how-to-change-collation-in-database

USE WITH CAUTION!