Special/Multibyte Characteristics vs 3rd party services

[chadlly2003]

When I have an international customer some of there addresses have special characters. All is good in zencart

Example: 12,Le Méale.

but I use a third party program for shipping and that program does not like those characters.

Is there a way I can change something in the zencart code not to except those characters in the address field.

[DrByte]

The world has gone to multibyte characters.
There's little point in telling users to give you an address that isn't accurate (ie: missing accents etc).

Instead, better to get the rest of the systems updated to use modern character sets.
If that's out of your control, then you could explore adding a translation step between your proper data and the extracted data. That'll require writing code to convert characters to a fallback of some sort.

It'd be best to put pressure on that third party though.

[chadlly2003]

I figured that. I just wanted to double check. Thank you.

[lat9]

Make sure, too, that the Zen Cart is using a multi-byte character set (e.g. utf-8) for its display. It might be that the Zen Cart is using a latin1-based character set while the 3rd party requires (as most do these days) a multi-byte one.

[chadlly2003]

Yes I have utf-8 character set. I also checked my databse and all tables are marked utf8_general_ci