Some products' descriptions disappeared after migration and upgrade from 1.3.9 to 1.5

[delia]

There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. Just some of the old products are affected and only in admin. They show fine on the site itself. I went thru the description of one of them and found the curly apostrophes instead of the regular ones and changed them just in case but it's made no difference. It just has to be something in the description that's preventing it from showing on the page.

[DrByte]

Sounds very much like the data in your database is in a format that doesn't match the character set used by your store or by your database-connection, thus the problems.

Remember, if you upgraded from v1.3.9 to v1.5.x and your 1.3.x database was NOT utf8 then you'll need to make sure your new site's language files are changed from utf8 to whatever character set they were using BEFORE the upgrade.

All explained here: http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?...8859-1-to-utf8

[delia]

Well, thanks for that link again. I've got to start a spreadsheet of these links!

However, making those changes did not work. I am using the original configure files from 1.3.9 so I just added define('DB_CHARSET', 'latin1'); . It's the old english file as well and it does still have the line define('CHARSET', 'iso-8859-1'); and @setlocale(LC_TIME, 'en_US.ISO_8859-1');

When I ran into this before, I had started fresh with 1.5 and just upgraded the database so changing the 1.5 configure and english files worked for that one. I also remember the problems were more obvious and not so erratic as this.

[DrByte]

But you've determined that it's related to problems with the characters in the description, right?
Have you tried switching it back and forth to different character sets?
Are the myDebug errorlogs showing anything that PHp is complaining about?

[Limitless]

Delia,

I noticed this on a few products in my admin right after I added the 'additional product fields' mod and embedded a youtube video and/or attached a pdf.

It does not happen on all products (with or without the additional fields), and the data is visible within my Zen Cart Store Manager app (Windows Application) and visible on the catalog side, but all fields are blank on the admin side of things.

[delia]

yikes, there is a php error. It didn't stop the page so I didn't realize there was one.

[20-Sep-2012 08:10:41] PHP Warning: htmlspecialchars() [<a href='function.htmlspecialchars'>function.htmlspecialchars</a>]: Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in /home/ostermy/public_html/store/zenmin/includes/modules/product/collect_info.php on line 401

I did find your post about that and we are definitely then in the utf8 territory.

Limitless, the version of my product extra fields is not a 1.5 version. If you mean numinix, be sure you also have a 1.5 version. And find the correct forum thread to post this in.

[Limitless]

Ok, that's weird. I was 100% sure it said it was 1.5 compatible when I downloaded and installed it a few weeks ago.

Well, the plugin ~appears~ to work on 1.5, excluding random missing data in admin (not even sure if its related).