Product descriptions box empty when trying to edit any product.

[CunningStunt2]

Not sure what I've missed, Now I've gone live with 1.5.7c i'm having an issue where the products description is not showing on the admin back end. When editing any product all the info is there, including attributes, but the description box is empty so I cannot update the page without saving blank info to that field. I don't think I had this problem with my test site prior to going live so I must have missed a setting somewhere.

There are no errors or warnings being generated in the logs folder.

myphpadmin shows the tables in my database are all utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci


and these are the relevant settings I can find


I have the same settings in admin and non-admin configures

any pointers would be appreciated. tia

[CunningStunt2]

I just noticed when copying my database the product description data has somehow changed from being a text string to being saved as a blob. No idea how I did that or how to put it back to how it was >.<

[mc12345678]

Some questions.

If you attempt to create a new product, enter content in the product description box, does the information save and is it then displayable on the catalog?
If that same new product is edited again, does the product description open in the admin to be edited?
When you step through one of the existing products where the description is not on screen, had the description then been stripped off of the catalog side?

What were the differences between the live site environment and the test environment?

Please tell us the history of the database/store. Said just went live with 1.5.7c, but what was there before? What actions were done to get to the current version?

Does the same sort of issue occur if attempt to modify the category description(s)?

[CunningStunt2]

If you attempt to create a new product, enter content in the product description box, does the information save and is it then displayable on the catalog? If that same new product is edited again, does the product description open in the admin to be edited?

Yes, I created a new product with a short description, it shows in the store and when going back in to edit it the description is visible.

When you step through one of the existing products where the description is not on screen, had the description then been stripped off of the catalog side?

No, on the store everything seems fine, every product has a visible description. Initially I though the issue was affecting every product but I am finding a few products where the description is fine on the admin side. Last night I fixed the description for 2 rolls of tape just by copying the description from the store side and updating the product. But as I click through everything now I am finding products which do have the description and some of them are quite long, others with a lot of descriptive information are not showing up in the product edit page and some which don't show are simply one line of text that says something like 'a general purpose masking tape'. It seems quite random.

What were the differences between the live site environment and the test environment?

As far as I am aware there were no differences (I'm kind of a novice when it comes to webhosting). I had been working with 1.5.7c using a subdomain on the same server as my 1.5.6c live store. I moved to a dedicated vps a few weeks back and as I wanted to update my store I made sure the host was aware of the recommended requirements for zen 1.5.7

Please tell us the history of the database/store. Said just went live with 1.5.7c, but what was there before? What actions were done to get to the current version?

I had a 1.5.6 store running before. Once I had everything looking good on my 1.5.7 subdomain I put the live store into maintenance mode, then copied the live stores database to a new database using phpmyadmin. I then moved all the 1.5.6 files out of my public_html and moved the 1.5.7 files in. Edited the admin and non-admin configures to replace the subdomain info with the root of my public_html and pointed the files to the new database I just created. I then reuploaded the zc_install folder and ran the upgrade.

To fix an issue my GDPR tables I ran an SQL patch from here (I had done the same when setting up my test store)
https://www.zen-cart.com/showthread....75#post1378875

I then used the utf8mb4 conversion tool on my database and followed the relevant instructions here to ensure utf8
https://docs.zen-cart.com/user/upgra...nvert_to_utf8/

Does the same sort of issue occur if attempt to modify the category description(s)?

I do not believe so, but the vast majority of my category descriptions are blank anyway.
Thanks for your time.

[CunningStunt2]

I think I may have found the issue. It seems some of my text descriptions contain characters the system does not like. Mostly where I have used °C to denote temperature ranges. These are showing on the catalogue side as black diamonds with a question mark inside it. So i'm able to copy the info from my old 1.3.8 database and remove the offending characters.

I've been entering deg C as ALT + 0176 to get the °C is there a better way to do this? for the moment im just changing it to text saying degrees celcius.

Neither of these products we're showing the product edit page.

[VDecalS]

I googled How do you display degrees in HTML? and came up with these alternatives:

UNICODE. U+000B0.
HEX CODE. °
HTML CODE. °
HTML ENTITY. °
CSS CODE. \00B0. <span>&#176;</span> content: "\00B0";