Zen Cart with UTF-8 database

[thewolf]

Hi,

I've installed Zen Cart 1.3.7.1 on Red Hat Enteprise Linux 4 with Plesk 8.1 (control panel), PHP 4.3.9 and MySQL 4.1.x.

I've noticed that the ZC db (created through Plesk) is using UTF-8 as charset, instead of the usual ISO-8859-1.

So far my Zen Cart installation is working fine, but I'm afraid that something may break in the future (especially when handling non-ASCII characters) due to the fact that the Zen Cart PHP application is using ISO-8859-1 as charset while the MySQL db is using UTF-8.

Should I re-install ZC using an ISO-8859-1 db instead to be on the safe side?

Or is it safe to keep the current setup?

Thanks.

[kobra]

If this is an english only site you should be ok - there are issues with altering an existing DB's colliation and one can get many strange characters if you are not careful. Select one and stick with it

[thewolf]

Hi,

Since this is a new ZC installation, I can still drop the db and create it from scratch using ISO-8859-1 if that is a safer choice.

What do you think?

Thanks.

[kobra]

This really depends on the default that your host has set...if like cpanel then the oneclick backups are saved in the default colliation and this can be problematic for some.

I would determine the default and use that unless you require multi language

[thewolf]

This really depends on the default that your host has set...

What do you mean exactly with the default that my host has set?

Thanks.

[kobra]

What do you mean exactly with the default that my host has set?

When the mysql is installed as part of the system - the host in this case can set or configure mysql with a default colliation. Then if this is a cPanel account or Plesk and probably others - the backup facility provided in these uses the default.

If you use phpmyadmin to create the backups you can set the colliation used for the backup.