Character set/database collation/date settings

[mi16chap]

Following a recent migration of my test website from 1.39h to 1.5 I am having a few issues with the format of various characters in my site.

I installed 1.5 from scratch and created a new database.
I then carefully merged my 1.39h based template with the 1.5 files, checking that the changes I used in 1.39h would not clash with newer 1.5 versions...I used winmerge to manage this.

Im now finding the following problems with my new 1.5 site.

1. date of birth is stored as yyyy-mm-dd in the database/displayed as dd/dd/yyyy on the my account store settings.
2. Pound symbols in my confirmation emails (text version) seem to display the sterling £ symbol incorrectly(appearing as = £xx.xx), despite setting this correctly in my admin/currency and email config settings

My site http://test.italianhampers.co.uk/ind...e=account_edit

Im not sure if these things are related. Im using an override file of the english.php to get the date format as I want on the customers date of birth, I followed
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/i...hp?article=401

I noticed the collation settings on my database are UTF8_general_ci , does this need to be set in my english.php file too? (instead of 'en_GB.ISO_8859-1' as per the guide above)

Thanks for any help

Andy

[mi16chap]

I might be able to answer my own question here...

Found courtesy of http://www.picaflor-azul.com/index.p...oducts_id=1090

CHANGE-136 on new installs, DB_CHARSET now defaults to UTF8, not latin1

My old 1.39h database backup is set to create tables with
DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_general_ci

Do I need to alter my english.php file to match the UTF-8 encoding? or do I alter the database collation settings? (or neither!)

[DrByte]

https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/i...hp?article=414