UTF8: Site full of question marks. Latin1: no product description in admin

Site full of question marks after upgrading from 1.3.9h to 1.5.1. I changed the 'DB_CHARSET' to 'latin1', and this fixed the question marks problem, but then when editing product within the admin there was no description.

Using define('CHARSET', 'utf-8');
In phpMyAdmin, all table Collation are utf8_general_ci already
I tried converting products_description to utf8_unicode_ci or latin1_bin
but did not fix the question marks

I also tested 'MySQL charset converter (beta)' to convert tables to utf8_general_ci that were already utf8_general_ci.

I suppose I just want to clear the question marks, because trying to run with false latin1 seems to cause a bigger problem.

now I am finding that some items have product description in admin and some do not. I am looking into why. there is no difference between the products.

The conversion script you've mentioned "MySQL charset converter (beta)", often causes data loss in the product description. This is why we do not recommend or use that plugin and also why it's considered beta.

When converting to UTF-8, if your PHP files contain non-UTF8 characters, they will appear with the question mark character. You'll often need to download the file and re-save it using UTF-8. This usually isn't a problem for English language files, but can be a real pain with Spanish and French language packs.

numinix:

The conversion script you've mentioned "MySQL charset converter (beta)", often causes data loss in the product description. This is why we do not recommend or use that plugin and also why it's considered beta.I had a problem converting my "english only" sites to utf8. I found that it truncated newsletters and ezpages at single quotes and other symbols.
This mod first converts to a blob then converts to utf8
In my case commenting out the intermediate blob conversion solved my problems.
But of course it may NOT solve yours.
Thats where a backup is essential before you try these conversions.

Originally I forgot to change the admin english CHARSET :blush:. My mistake. When I looked at the old files they were both iso-8859-1. Changing the admin CHARSET fixed my problem (both of them).

numinix:

The conversion script you've mentioned "MySQL charset converter (beta)", often causes data loss in the product description. This is why we do not recommend or use that plugin and also why it's considered beta.

When converting to UTF-8, if your PHP files contain non-UTF8 characters, they will appear with the question mark character. You'll often need to download the file and re-save it using UTF-8. This usually isn't a problem for English language files, but can be a real pain with Spanish and French language packs.

I downloaded the database before applying, and because plugin did not fix the problem I restored straight away.