Currency Symbol problem in text emails -Change Database Collation -?

Hi, I have zen cart 1.3d installed and database data was imported from an oscommerce database to get the existing product details etc.

The collation in any zencart installs I have previously setup has been latin1_general_ci

However I noticed today when trying to fix the Currency symbol issue in text emails appearing as a '?', that the collation in this zencart is uft8_general_ci

This is the only difference I can find between other sites where the currentcy symbol for Euro works fine.

I have read through the many posts on this and checked all usual CHARSET & Config -> Email options settings

My CHARSET is set to : ISO-8859-1
And Emaill options - > Convert currencies set to default of : £,£:€,€

I tried setting charset to ISO-8859-15 as this is supposed to be where the € symbol resides and this made the symbol blank in emails (which is better than ?) however it made some euro symbols on the web pages different characters.

Therefore I am wondering is it the Collation of UFT in the database is confilicting with something in zencart configuration that is causing this?

Big question is should I change the collation in the database ? (I am guessing this would cause more problems and maybe not fix this at all ??)

Any advise appreciated, thank you.

Lisa

BTW I cannot upgrade zencart higher than 1.3.8h currently due to PHP version 5.1.37 limitation on server

1. Ideally you would want all character sets to be the same. Most people prefer to stick with UTF8 ... which means making many conversions of data that isn't in UTF8 so that it is. Whatever it is you decide to do, pick one and make the rest the same.

2. Your site security is in question if you're using older than v1.3.9. Even if your host can't offer you a contemporary version of PHP, you ought to be upgrading. Ideally you would choose a host who is able to keep up to date with contemporary versions of PHP etc.
   You should not be casually letting this issue slide.

BTW I cannot upgrade zencart higher than 1.3.8h currently due to PHP version 5.1.37 limitation on server

I'm pretty sure there was no 1.38h. Did you mean 1.39h?

Sorry yes it is version v1.3.9d

And yes I realise I need to migrate to higher PHP version soon

But still cannot find solution to Euro symbol not appearing in emails :(

Thanks for replies.
Sorry for my late response

Lisa