Product Content Missing after moving to new server

Hello,
we have moved one cart to a new linux server and all of a sudden realized that in the Admin Panel of the cart the content of half of the products is missing. They display ok on the customers side of the website, but not on the Admin portion. When i try to COPY and PASTE content from the archived cart to the new one, the content wouldnt copy....Then i realizes that if there were any kind of special characters like bullet points, `...etc, the content doesnt copy....If I remove them it would.

Any idea what may have happened and if there is a quicker way to remedy this? Thsi client has over 2000 products and it would take hell of a time to Copy and Paste each one and figure out if there are any special characters...
The transfer process and database copy didnot return any errors.

Thanks

What version of PHP is being used on your new host? I'm guessing that it's a version later than PHP 5.2.17.

I need to check for sure but i would say yes...Any idea why this is happening...Its like everything that has any "special characters" has been deleted.....Any way to restore it for the old server?
Thanks

I also tried to copy content into Notepad first-because Notepad supposedly doesnot keep the formatting and then paste it into the new site , but it still not work..I have to review every single product and figure out what in the content triggues it so it wouldnt copy.HELP ! Thanks

You need to either convince your host to (if possible) downgrade your PHP version to 5.2.17 or upgrade your Zen Cart from 1.3.9d to v1.5.4.

svetlae:

I need to check for sure but i would say yes...Any idea why this is happening...Its like everything that has any "special characters" has been deleted.....Any way to restore it for the old server?
Thanks

Check to see if the language you are using on your new server matches the language that was used on your old server.

well, moving to this new machine was part of the process of the upgrade....We had to move to a better machine and then upgrade

If the language is downgraded, will this restore the missing information?

It has nothing to do with your language or language files, your issue has to do with the fact that you have entered non-ASCII characters in your products (as opposed to using the HTML symbols, e.g. ® for ®) and since your v1.3.9d store is now using a version of PHP that interprets these characters using UTF-8 encoding unless otherwise specified.

That PHP change was one of the basic changes made to the core Zen Cart functionality starting in ZC1.5.1, to specify which character encoding to use.