UTF-8 Zen-Cart Tutorial for v1.3.x

[BlessIsaacola]

I agree -- that script was probably the closest I've seen to reliably handling most of the steps involved in properly preserving data while converting character sets and collation to UTF8.

I've made some alterations to overcome several of the limitations I see in it, and contributed the result here:
http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...oducts_id=1937

Feedback welcome.

DrByte, your instruction said

e) Update your Zen Cart configure.php settings to use UTF8 for DB_CHARSET

I do not see the option for this change in either the catalog or admin configure.php. Is this setting located somewhere else?

Thanks!

[DrByte]

Post 92, earlier in this thread, has a link to how to handle this in 1.3.9: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=153582

[BlessIsaacola]

Post 92, earlier in this thread, has a link to how to handle this in 1.3.9: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=153582

Thanks DrByte! Do I need to touch these two lines of code in english.php for both catalog or admin? Just curious.

setlocale(LC_TIME, 'en_US.ISO_8859-1');
define('CHARSET', 'iso-8859-1'); 

[DrByte]

Hmmm ... ya, probably a good idea. :)

[BlessIsaacola]

Hmmm ... ya, probably a good idea. :)

Okay, this is getting more complicated than I thought. There are actually 8 files or so in Zen Cart that reference iso-8859-1 and I am not sure of only english.php files needs the changes or if I have to touch more files.

When you get a chance to give this some thought it will probably be a good idea to provide more information on the best way to approach this.

Originally, this was going to be my plan of attack.

1. run your script

2. create /includes/extra_configures/my_db_charset.php and /adminFOLDER/includes/extra_configures/my_db_charset.php

3 Add this code to the above two files:

<?php define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

Update english php file in the catalog and admin to:

change this line from

setlocale(LC_TIME, 'en_US.ISO_8859-1'); 

to

setlocale(LC_TIME, 'en_US.utf8'); 

change this line from

define('CHARSET', 'iso-8859-1'); 

to

define('CHARSET', 'utf-8'); 

Also, I am not sure what the difference between utf8 and utf-8 is just simply follow the instruction provided. A clarification between the two if any will help as well.

[DrByte]

Keep in mind that the script itself is only intended to deal with the *database* conversion.


You *are* doing this on a TEST site, right?

[DrByte]

If you're going to edit any language files, you need to be sure to save them encoded as UTF8-without-BOM. Otherwise you'll have a BOM header at the top of each file, which will cause you headaches with blank pages and Headers Already Sent errors.

DB_CHARSET would be 'utf8'
CHARSET in the language files would be 'UTF-8'
and LC_TIME would be 'en_US.utf8'

[BlessIsaacola]

The script worked flawlessly without any errors and it was done applied in production but I had like 4 different backup of the database.

Thanks and I am glad I didn't destroyed our site in the process of converting the DB to utf8. That was a very nifty script!

[DrByte]

:)

[BlessIsaacola]

Just so I am perfectly clear, there's absolutely no reason to touch any of these files even after the database has been converted to utf-8?

CATALOG/nddbc.html
Line #4 : <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

ADMINFOLDER/alert_page.php
Line #22 : <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

includes/classes/class.phpmailer.php
Line #43 : var $CharSet = "iso-8859-1";

/includes/functions/functions_email.php
Line #171 : $mail->CharSet = (defined('CHARSET')) ? CHARSET : "iso-8859-1";

/includes/functions/functions_general.php
Line #1582 : if (function_exists('iconv')) $string = iconv("Windows-1252", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE", $string);

/includes/templates/template_default/templates/tpl_zc_install_suggested_default.php
Line #19 : <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />