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

[CrystalKoi]

does this text look right?
ЧћЧ•Ч¦ЧЁ Ч–Ч” Ч”ЧЄЧ•Ч•ЧЎЧЈ Ч‘Ч™Ч•Чќ щбъ, 13 Ч‘ошх, 2010

[CrystalKoi]

If that is right, just do a search of the files with dreamweaver for part of that language, shouldn't be too hard to track down. Give it a go!

[Asdesign]

I use Total Commander since it can track down text strings within files. Thing is, I did a simple test. In the english version you'd expect the days to be "sunday, monday" etc'. So I looked for "sunday" and it didn't catch anything, meaning ZC somehow generates this on the fly.

[CrystalKoi]

No, I don't think this is true, as it would not generate Hebrew on the fly. You need to do a search for a part of the hebrew with whatever file search tool you have. Once you find the file, you need to change the encoding of that file. Good luck

[Asdesign]

Hmm, I checked my SQL database and few tables have "latin1_swedish_ci" in the collation column instead of utf8, does that pose any problem?

[DrByte]

I suspect your DATE_FORMAT_LONG definition is wrong, or your server is not generating the date "words" properly when the strftime() function is called. You may have to resolve the matter with your hosting company by confirming that they've got a valid hebrew language config set in their PHP.
NOTE: All the date "words" are generated by the PHP configuration on your server. Zen Cart DOES NOT spell out all the days of the week and months of the year in a language file.

files involved in english to display the "date added" content:
/includes/languages/english/YOUR_TEMPLATE/product_info.php (and other product types too):

define('TEXT_DATE_ADDED', 'This product was added to our catalog on %s.');

/includes/languages/YOUR_TEMPLATE/english.php:

  define('DATE_FORMAT_LONG', '%A %d %B, %Y'); // this is used for strftime()

/includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/templates/tpl_product_info_display.php (and other product types too):

      <p id="productDateAdded" class="productGeneral centeredContent"><?php echo sprintf(TEXT_DATE_ADDED, zen_date_long($products_date_added)); ?></p>

/includes/functions/functions_general.php in the zen_date_long() function:

    return strftime(DATE_FORMAT_LONG, mktime($hour,$minute,$second,$month,$day,$year));

[Asdesign]

Hmm, I've already converted these files to UTF-8 :) But...I think I may have found the problem. I didn't convert the admin hebrew language (it's basically the old english language files) files so I get this error in the admin aswell. I'm going to convert them and then check again, hoping this will resolve the problem. The server settings should be good. If this doesn't work I'll check deeper into it. Thanks a lot Dr.Byte, I'm afraid this forum is huge so I posted in few places to make sure it gets attention. Didn't mean to upset anyone.

[Asdesign]

Hmm...I noticed that if I change the encoding back to windows-1255 on the browser it displays fine. Hmmm..................this doesn't relate to the SQL anywayn, does it?

[DrByte]

No connection to SQL.
I suspect maybe the server's language file may not be properly encoded?
Just a guess

[Asdesign]

I understand. How is that file named? php.ini perhaps? I'm also wondering, if another cart is installed on the server and uses charset windows-1255, will it be badly affected from changing the encoding of the server language file?