Paypal IPN - "unsupported characters for this field"

I tried doing a search, but did not find a resolution to the problem.
I have a fresh install testing 1.3.7, nothing is modified or added and it is only the testshop following the install that is included.

When I entered a testshopper for Paypal IPN, everything goes well with the orders, but when buyer is directed to Paypal, an errormessage shows up: "You have entered unsupported characters for this field. Current available language character types are: European, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Thai. Please try again."

At first I thought that it was because of the norwegian language and the letters Æ,Ø,Å in the customers adress, but when I tested it with a name and adress not including these letters, the error still occurs.

The error does not prevent the transaction from happening, but if I was a real customer I would certainly think something was wrong and might stop the transaction.

What to change and where?

My testshop is located here: https://www.igroshage.no/test

Does the same occur when using Express Checkout ?

DrByte:

Does the same occur when using Express Checkout ?

I haven't installed the express checkout, I thought it was only available to the US? I'll give it a try and report back.

And after installing express checkout and the patch, it works like a charm! Thank you, for some reason I thought you had to be located in North America to use it, but now I understand it is not so.

Hi,

I'm getting the same error message. What is the resolution of this problem?

I figured out why its doing it. It's because I spell my name

Tomás

How do I stop the error in future for something similar?

tbrides:

I figured out why its doing it. It's because I spell my name

Tomás

How do I stop the error in future for something similar?The May 10 patch should fix this.
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?p=372071#post372071

Hi there

I am using Cart v1.3.8 and I am just about to go nuts regarding special (German) characters like e.g. 'ü':

1) I noticed pretty soon that Zen Cart naturally displays special characters like 'ü' wrongly with questionmarks and thelike. Therefore, I followed the advice on http://www.srw2d.com/content/utf-8-zen-cart and basically changed on phpMyAdmin the Collation to utf8_general_ci and changed the Zen Cart encoding in includes/languages/german.php etc. from IS0-8859-1 to UTF-8.

**2) **Now I have noticed that Zen Cart displays the special characters nicely but when forwarding them to PayPal IPN, I see questionmarks on the PayPal site. PayPal tech support told me to change character encoding to "Windows-1252" in their admin too, but this didn't help. I then got the advice from a smart guy from Austria to delete the line '$s = preg_replace ('/&([a-zA-Z])(uml|acute|elig|grave|circ|tilde|cedil|ring|quest|slash|caron);/', '$1', $s);' of the function replace_accents($s) in the file /includes/functions/functions_general.php. Having done that, PayPal now perfectly displays the special characters.

3) But now I still have PayPal writing the following message in red letters: 'You have entered unsupported characters for this field. Current available language character types are: European, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Thai. Please try again.'!!!!

I have read more or less all available information on that subject but I can't find a solution.

Since PayPal tech supporters told me that I am the only one with this problems, I fear that I have somehow messed up my store regarding character encoding.

Is there anyone how could help me out here??? You would save me from definitely getting nuts!

Hmmmmm.... you are saying that the May 10 2007 patch would fix this issue about "unsupported characters for this field", but today using ZC v1.3.8 I am still encountering exactly the same problem!!!

Actually, if a client is redirected to my PayPal IPN page and deletes the complete prefilled form on the PayPal page and then fills in the form again without using any special characters and then tries to process the payment, PayPal still gives back this nasty "You have entered unsupported characters for this field..." sentence.

How can that be??? I mean, the user is reentering the form date on the PayPal page and he still get's back this message.

Pleeeeease help!

Yesssss!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have got the solution!!! :clap:

I have tested the following browsers and found out that only Chrome shows the error message! Seems that Chrome has a bug here.

Crome 5.0 Error
Firefox 3.6 OK
IE 8.0, 7.0 OK
Safari 4.0 OK
iPhone/Safari OK

I am actually a little bit surprised that no one else seems to have spotted this bug. Could anyone of you shorty test your PayPal IPN integration with Chrome and let us know whether you are experiencing the same problems?

Yesssss!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have got the solution!!!

I have tested the following browsers and found out that only Chrome shows the error message! Seems that Chrome has a bug here.

Crome 5.0 Error
Firefox 3.6 OK
IE 8.0, 7.0 OK
Safari 4.0 OK
iPhone/Safari OK

I am actually a little bit surprised that no one else seems to have spotted this bug. Could anyone of you shorty test your PayPal IPN integration with Chrome and let us know whether you are experiencing the same problems?

The same happens with paypal express checkout. I can confirm that only Chrome is affected.

However, using the Paypal instruction to integrate Paypal express checkout into another Shop (my own), this problem does not occur.

It seems to be a Zen Cart bug visible at Chrome only.

Anyone who has an idea how to fix it?

Thanks
Frank (from Germany, using zen cart v1.3.9f)