Quote Originally Posted by Feznizzle View Post
I'll try replacing with html equivilent again.

In the mean time, I went to the DB using Sequel Pro and clicked Table Info (was looking at products-description). Found this info:
Code:
CREATE TABLE `products_description` (
  `products_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `language_id` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
  `products_name` varchar(150) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `products_description` text COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci,
  `products_url` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  `products_viewed` int(5) DEFAULT '0',
  PRIMARY KEY (`products_id`,`language_id`),
  KEY `idx_products_name_zen` (`products_name`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=11640 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;
I don't understand SQL (or any coding, really), but looks like the db wants utf8... is that right??? If so, then EP4 should have worked off the shelf. But EP4 seems to have improved since switching away from UTF8.

Naaaarg. lolz
Okay, would like to regroup a little.

Right now, what is going on is that the database is prepared to handle utf8, but everything about the store is "in the past" and pushing latin1/ISO-8539-1 to the database (and expecting everything that comes from the database to be in the same format regardless of how it is stored). The next thing about all this as pointed out earlier, export followed by import of the same file made no changes to the content which is everything about EP4 functionality did not affect the encoding. Therefore, EP4 never was a problem from what can be determined. The problem has been in editing and properly storing the edited file to be able to be handled by EP4.

Right now the store is in a mixed state which is typically undesirable and could become problematic with upgrading as well considering that latin1 is trying to be pushed to utf8 instead of latin1 to latin1 and utf8 to utf8. But that all is a different topic.

Again, EP4 is not the issue regarding the character encoding with the upload or download. Right now it is finding a suitable editor that will allow the full use of the characters that have been presented to the database. Without completely installing a system with similar setup which may or may not be possible based on the age of software and availability of similar setup, all I can really do at the moment is offer guidance/suggestions of ways to work around it. I might be able to setup a local server and platform on my computer, but seems like it would take up several hours of time to do.