Invalid multibyte sequence in argument???

[inovermyhead]

Hello, all ... hope this is in the right department, but didn't know where else to put it. We recently had 2 of our stores upgraded to 1.5.1 from 1.3.9h, Faery's Whimsy in January and CreekTreeUSA the first part of February. Everything seemed to be working fine, but yesterday we became aware that in some of our listings the description was disappearing on the CreekTree store.
Some research turned up multiple logs that showed:
[28-Feb-2014 12:29:25 America/New_York] PHP Warning: htmlspecialchars() [<a href='function.htmlspecialchars'>function.htmlspecialchars</a>]: Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in /home/creeenet/public_html/CTnimda18/includes/modules/product/collect_info.php on line 401

so after more research, we arrived at the conclusion that apostrophes in the description lines on CreekTree were causing all lines in the description to disappear. When the item is edited in admin, the description shows blank, and if you then update the record, it changes the record to have a blank description.

This is NOT happening in the Faery's Whimsy store. We have done compares against modules, including collect_info.php, from the two stores and have not turned up any differences. So we concluded that somewhere, somehow a setting was changed in the configuration, but we can't find where that might be.

If anyone can shed some light on this really weird issue, it would be much appreciated. If further information would help figure this out, please let us know.

Thanks in advance for any help at all.

[lhungil]

Hello, all ... our stores upgraded to 1.5.1 from 1.3.9h ... we became aware that in some of our listings the description was disappearing ... logs ... showed:
[28-Feb-2014 12:29:25 America/New_York] PHP Warning: htmlspecialchars() [<a href='function.htmlspecialchars'>function.htmlspecialchars</a>]: Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in /home/creeenet/public_html/CTnimda18/includes/modules/product/collect_info.php on line 401
...

First thought is have you checked your settings for charset in both PHP / Zen Cart and also in the database? In version 1.5.x of Zen Cart the default was changed from iso-latin-1 (supports most western languages) to UTF8 (supports most languages worldwide). If your site was previously using iso-latin-1 (1.3.9x and older usually did), you may need to make some changes (either convert everything to utf8, or force everything to use iso-latin-1).

[inovermyhead]

Hello, lhungil, thanks for the response. We have checked that and changed the parameters on the configure.php (both) and english.php to force latin1 and it did not seem to make any difference at all.

[inovermyhead]

ihungil, your response made me go check again, and found the admin/language/english.php had been missed. Changed it to latin1 and we are working again.

Many thanks!

[lhungil]

De nada, Glad you were able to get back to business!