Quote marks in EZ Pages get messed up

When I edit EZ Pages in Chrome, my single quotes and double quotes get messed up. They appear as a "?" question mark inside a black diamond. If I save the text, they appear on the page as some special characters. I edit without using any of the add-on editors. I edit the raw html in the standard window in the Zen control panel.

Here's an example that should read as "don't": don�t

I've learned to use the special symbols for these characters, but the problem is whenever I edit one of my existing pages, Chrome converts all the existing single and double quotes. They appear as the question mark in a black diamond. And if I update the page without hunting them all down, then they appear like the example above.

Does anyone know what's going on with this? Is there a setting in Chrome that does this conversion? This didn't used to happen in Firefox, which leads me to believe that it's a chrome setting somewhere. But I haven't been able to find it.

Note, my ZC version is 1.3.9a and both FF and Chrome are latest versions.

Sounds like a character-set mismatch. Like you're using UTF8 characters but your store is still set to Latin1, or vice-versa.

Also, you're using 1.3.9 which isn't as smart as 1.5.1 in how it handles submitted data like htmlentity encoding such as & etc.

Hi Dr Byte,

Thank you very much.

Yes, that was it. I found another post of your about upgrades from 1.3.9 to 1.5 where you recommended using this line in configure.php:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'latin1'); 

That handled it for me. But why did that become necessary? I've been using my store for many years now, and it wasn't necessary before. Is it possible that google chrome is using a different character set? I noticed the problem when I switched from Firefox to Chrome. Could be coincidence I suppose...

It could be that your hosting company changed something on their server to keep progressively modernizing.
You should be doing the same by keeping your Zen Cart up to date also.

Thanks. That explains it. I had my host move me to a new VPS machine with upgraded Linux and cPanel software. That was date coincident with the issue also, but it didn't dawn on me that it could be the cause.

My biggest problem with upgrading has been my use of the Simple SEO URL mod. It hasn't been supported for some time, and I have so many links out there, that I just can't mess with changing any of them. I wish I'd chosen another SEO mod that is being supported through the upgrade to 1.5x or I would have upgraded.