Greek email characters ok in Outlook, not ok in browser

[andreasy]

I have upgraded from v1.3.9f to g and today to h but I don't remember if this issue was initially or appeared after upgrade because I was using Outlook mostly.

I have the Greek Lang. Pack installed.

Whatever message comes from Zen cart (i.e. Tell a friend, new user created, new order, etc.) and which arrive in Greek, are 100% ok in Outlook but if I view that message from whichever webmail in whichever browser, it always shows wrong characters (like squares, diamonds, etc.) I have tried all Greek and UTF-8 encodings in the browser but that will only change the invalid characters to some other invalid characters but never to Greek.

Also, not as imprtant, but if I view my site (http://yiangoullis.trustnet.com.cy/eshop/) in IE it shows Greek just fine but, if I view it in Opera it won't detect Greek but if I change encoding to Greek, then it's ok. I don't understand though why IE detects Greek but Opera not.

My highest concern is on the first issue though as most of my customers will be using webmail and will have the same problem.

[kobra]

My highest concern is on the first issue though as most of my customers will be using webmail and will have the same problem.

If there webmail is not set to display that language then you have no control over their settings

[andreasy]

If there webmail is not set to display that language then you have no control over their settings

I have tried this myself with IE, Opera and Firefox. All 3 browsers have Greek encoding and UTF-8 but none of those settings will properly display Greek although the Greek page is correctly displayed. Only email is the issue.

[kobra]

Only email is the issue

It is the settings in the email client not the browser

[torvista]

I could only get FF to display your site correctly (I think..) after manually selecting greek.

Maybe your page character set declaration does not match the character set you have encoded your language defines files in:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf8_unicode-ci" />

as I dont find "utf8_unicode-ci" in this list:
http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets

so maybe the browser is ignoring the unknown declaration and then guessing the encoding. IE8 did not work either.

[andreasy]

I could only get FF to display your site correctly (I think..) after manually selecting greek.

Maybe your page character set declaration does not match the character set you have encoded your language defines files in:



as I dont find "utf8_unicode-ci" in this list:
http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets

so maybe the browser is ignoring the unknown declaration and then guessing the encoding. IE8 did not work either.

Sge as it works for me with IE8. I used utf8_unicode-ci because this is how I configured the database in MySQL to work. Do you think that if I modify this from utf8_unicode-ci to plain utf8_unicode it will resolve the problem? I am afraid not to break communication between the application and the database though as it was very hard to get it working.

[torvista]

Do you think that if I modify this from utf8_unicode-ci to plain utf8_unicode it will resolve the problem?

No.

You are confusing the mysql database charset/collation with the charset definition of the webpage zen cart serves to the browser. These all need to be correct but they are not defined in the same places.

You need to have

// charset for web pages and emails
define('CHARSET', 'utf-8');

in your language (greek.php?) file so
content="text/html; charset=utf-8"

appears in the head of the webpage.

For everything to work correctly:
1) Your language define files need to be in utf-8.
2) The zen cart to mysql connection must be utf-8 too:
3) the webpage charset must be defined as utf-8.

this is all explained here
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=93439

and other problems you may have with using utf-8 may well be covered in the spanish thread:
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=153401