Whats this!!

[SilverKop]

Recently upgraded from 1.3.8a to 1.3.9h and the site is working fine except this symbol [FONT=Verdana]�[/FONT] is appearing in various places on the site. Like instead of £ I get [FONT=Verdana]�.



[/FONT]

[Website Rob]

It is the way Browser will display a symbol it doesn't understand. Suggest you do a web search on how to display the symbol you want.

[SilverKop]

It is the way Browser will display a symbol it doesn't understand. Suggest you do a web search on how to display the symbol you want.

That sounds fine but the [FONT=Verdana]� symbol appears not only by my £ sign but also in the stamp description and also in IE. This never happened with version 1.3.8a.
[/FONT]

[SilverKop]

I do not understand how it is my browser causing the problem.
On my computer this appears in firefox and ie and on my lap top it does the same but the symbol changes to a small box.

It appears not only instead of £ and ½ but also in spaces in products and shipping etc. The appearance is terrible and looks a mess and never appeared in the previous version 1.3.8a.

Can someone please advise me how to correct this.

[torvista]

The header of your page is telling the browser the charset of the text in the page is encoded in utf 8.

The corrupted characters are characters that the browser is trying to display as though they are utf-8 encoded but actually are not, and so are shown as unknown chars.

If you change the encoding of the page (in FF View->character encoding->ISO 8859) you will see the characters restored.

So, at a guess, my theory is that
you changed your database and language files from the default install to utf-8,
and changed the default old query factory to make the mysql connection utf-8,
and entered your text into the database as utf-8,
and then upgraded the zen cart files overwriting your customised query factory.

So zen cart is now putting and pulling text into the database as iso-8859.
You need to correct your database connection to utf-8 as per these instructions
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=153582

Or, it could be all the other way round and just that your english.php has the wrong encoding defined - which determines the charset in the header.

[SilverKop]

/includes/extra_configures/my_db_charset.php
Code:
<?php define('DB_CHARSET', 'your_charset_here');
Do the same with: /admin/includes/extra_configures/my_db_charset.php


Many thanks, My host company upgraded from 1.3.8a to 1.3.9h for me but I have now added the extra files with charset as utf-8 and still a conflict.
If you change the encoding of the page (in FF View->character encoding->ISO 8859) you will see the characters restored. Yes that is correct.

What am doing wrong?

[torvista]

I assume the front page text is in an html_define file.

Open it in the zc admin define pages editor.
Is it corrupted? If so, correct and save it.
If that fixes it you'll need to redo the others similarly.

Have you been editing those pages in another application which has the encoding set to 8859?

[SilverKop]

I assume the front page text is in an html_define file.

Open it in the zc admin define pages editor.
Is it corrupted? If so, correct and save it.
If that fixes it you'll need to redo the others similarly.

Have you been editing those pages in another application which has the encoding set to 8859?

Yes files in html_define editor and there is no disruption to text.



So zen cart is now putting and pulling text into the database as iso-8859.
You need to correct your database connection to utf-8 as per these instructions
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=153582


After doing this cannot open Admin at all, deleted the files and now OK. english.php set to utf-8.


Back to square one, any other help please.

[SilverKop]

Can I put this
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1,utf-8"

[FONT=Verdana] into the
[/FONT][FONT=Verdana]/includes/extra_configures/my_db_charset.php file to
get over the problem??[/FONT]

[torvista]

Can I put this
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1,utf-8"

into the
/includes/extra_configures/my_db_charset.php file to
get over the problem??

No.

You should read through this thread about converting to utf-8
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=93439
and carefully check the steps required against what you have in your shop.
That is your problem - not all the steps have been implemented correctly.
(The step about editing queryfactory has been superseded by my_db_charset.php as mentioned previously here.)