"Starting at" price not the lowest price

[DrByte]

DrByte's MySQL DB charset converter

You mean that experimental thing that says "use at own risk"?

[RixStix]

You mean that experimental thing that says "use at own risk"?

Yes DrByte. You beat me to confessing that the DBcharset converter was found to have inserted invisible characters (possibly randomly different & invisible) that were originally blank in the price_prefix and weight_prefix of the products_attributes table. If I knew those were the only invisible gremlins resulting from the use of the DBconverter, I would probably make the edits and keep the UTF8 version. Since I can't do that, I'll step back and just not use the converter.

After using the charset converter, I had looked through the DB for out of place characters and seeing none had thought all was fine.

Thankfully, Ajeh saved my bacon & figured it out while still in the sandbox. It would have been a bugger to correct if discovered weeks or months after going live.
I learned something to put in my "do not do or look for invisible gremins" memory.
I forgot how long it takes to restore the database and website files with a 1Mb connection.

Ajeh also found/fixed an unrelated problem with the 'keep_alive' timer that should not have existed. The website and DB backups were made immediately prior to installing keep_alive. Restoring the backup files did not remove all traces of keep_alive for some reason.

[RixStix]

coffee, donuts and a movie sent your way. TNX for the assist.

[DrByte]

coffee, donuts and a movie sent your way. TNX for the assist.

Wow. Thanks for your generous support.

If you have a copy of that old unconverted database in a zip file on a server somewhere, PM me with a link where I can download it for some testing, and I'll see if I can fix up whatever was missing from the script. No urgency to it ... just whenever you have some time.

[DrByte]

Thanks for sending me a test dataset.

I've confirmed that my beta utility does indeed fall short in handling those specific fields. Haven't determined "why". BUT there is a good workaround.

I tested a_berezin's convert_db2utf8.php utility http://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=1318 and it handles the data just fine. (It uses a different conversion strategy, which puts the onus on the MySQL server to do all the conversion logic, instead of on PHP like mine did.)
So, I'm recommending that a_berezin's utility be used instead of mine.

I also just posted an update to a_berezin's plugin to make it compatible with PHP 5.4-5.6

[RixStix]

Thank you DrByte.