Wrong non-english characters in names/addresses when using paypal express

Whenever I get orders from places where accented letters are used, they always show up with wrong characters in ZenCart.

When I check the transactions in my paypal account they show up fine.
For example:
The last name Sérudé shows up as Sérudé

Another example:
Zürich shows up as Zürich

What causes this and what can I do to fix it?

Thanks.

I can't reproduce this problem. é and ë come through fine ... showing correctly in customer's My Account area and in ZC Admin area.

What languages are installed in your site?
What collation-type is your database using?
What CHARSET are you using?

Hi DrByte, thanks for the reply.

I only have the default English language installed on my site.

When I log in to phpMyAdmin, I see I have this:

MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
MySQL collation connection: utf8_unicode_ci

Should I change any of this?

Sorry to drag this topic up but I couldn't find any other similar threads.

I have a similar problem to tj1. I have the same settings:
MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
MySQL collation connection: utf8_unicode_ci

Within the database, Collation = latin1_swedish_ci

Version 1.3.8a by the way. And the Euro currency symbol is processed as a ? in emails if that's relevant to this.

The last time this happened was when someone used Express Checkout which automatically created their account.
I've manually created an account and used special characters (ë etc) which are fine.

I searched for the à symbol in the database and it only occurs in customer related tables (address book, orders, paypal etc). So not in tables where special characters were insert manually--like product description.

tj1 / DrByte -- do you think it's related to the Paypal Express automatic account creation? Is a fix possible?

Thanks

Bringing back this old thread because I'm having the same problem, and it looks like it was never answered.

When customer accounts are created by hand (for credit card payments), special international characters in their addresses show just fine. However, characters coming from PayPal Express orders are broken.

For example, in an address:

av de la République

Strangely, sometimes the characters work in the shipping address, but not the billing, or vice versa. For instance, on one order, I see this in the shipping address:

Jean Jaurès

and this in the billing address:

Jean-Jaurès

When I look at the database itself through PHPMyAdmin the bad characters are in there.

Is there any way to get these characters to translate correctly when PayPal sends them back to Zen Cart?

Hi aeolidia

I can tell you I have not fixed this problem. At this time I look at the Paypal email to get the address or hope the custom has edited the address during checkout.

I can only think it's to do with how Paypal sends the custom data to our database, you will see my post above with UTF-8 and latin1_swedish_ci.
Would running PHP4 or PHP5 return different results?

Strangely, sometimes the characters work in the shipping address, but not the billing, or vice versa.
I have this too, but I think it's because the customer edits it during checkout. Unless you've talked to them and they've told you different?

Hopefully we can get some more thoughts on this. Anyone had this trouble and solved it?

Hi,

same problem here.

äöüß are translated to not readable symbols.

I think the data from Paypal has to be decoded, but from what to what ? UFT8->ISO ?

I hope we will find a solution for this...

Bye,
Ingo

I have same issue Zen Cart 1.3.8a

I have the same problem.

Maybe is it possible to change the paypal output charset?

This problem with special characters or accented fonts is now over 2 years old and still not fully solved.

There must be a good fix for this bug somewhere?

This not only happens with PayPal, but also GoogleCheckout, and I'm guessing any other mods that send this type of characters to ZC.
So, I think this really has something to do with ZenCart and how it handles those characters. Unfortunately, my technical knowledge on this is very limited and don't have a solution.
Until there's a solution we'll just have to log in to paypal or GoogleCheckout to see the info correctly formatted.

My problem is a bit different, but maybe related;

In the description of our (Italian site) in Google the è (è) is displayed as an Russian character.

In the <head> we have:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

In Mysql:
MySQL connection collation: utf8_general_ci
MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)

in the Google Webmaster Tools - Statistics - What Googlebot sees:
Encodings: CP1251 Windows Cyrillic (Russian)

What goes why, where wrong.
Thanks in advance for your help,
regards, anna

I face the same problem of not displaying correct the characters and I am wondering if there is by any chance, an option by which the customer's data are not transferred to the paypal's form.
That way, customer should have to enter his personal data on his own.
I think this would be better instead of viewing his personal info on characters that seem nonsense.

Thanks

I noticed today that sometimes the customer address is Ok and shows accented characters ok. It is sometimes only the shipping address that is wrong.

Notice I say sometimes.

I see this on my cart also, I am not 100% sure if this issue is a ZC bug or specific to some hosts. I have been working with my host on extensively to solve some text encoding issues when upgrading to UTF-8 on MySQL 5, but since this issue existed before my ongoing upgrade and is the genesis of my issues I thought I post my findings, in hopes that someone will see what the issue is here. So:

When a foreign address ex.: ```
test13 üöä

is entered at paypal site using paypal express checkout the address is input as utf8 at paypal's unicode utf8 site and displays correctly there as ```
 test13 üöä

the foreign address is then written to the ZC db in utf8 which is then displayed in ZC's Western latin1 browser as ```
test13 üöä

Switching the browser's text encoding from western latin1 to unicode  will translate it back to what was entered at paypal, on the checkout_shipping page: ```
 test13 üöä

viewing the address book entry in phpmyadmin (which is viewed in unicode/ utf8_general_ci) the address is ```
test13 üöä

dumping the table data into a Unicode (UTF-8, no BOM) file the address is displayed ```
test13 üöä',
``` reopening the file using the encoding Western (ISO latin 1)  the address is ```
test13 üöä'
```.

another issue is when adding an address in ZC ```
 test13 üöä
``` and using paypal express:

paypal sees: ```
test13 ��� 
``` in its default unicode browser setting, changing the view to  Western latin:```
 test13 üöä

I have tried to get rid of this issue by setting the default charset in the db to latin1 () ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=139 ;) and even utf8 () ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=139 ;), but nothing works.

sidetracking but: Possibly related to this issue: With my host no matter what the charset or collation the db is in all data will default to utf8 unless ZC specifies that it speaks latin1. Adding a line of code to the query_factory will fix this issue. However the paypal express issue remains with or without the query_factory change.

I am running ZC 1.3.8a on PHP5 and MySql 5, I have seen this issue with paypal addresses [Kübeckgasse] also on PHP5 and MySql 4.

I forgot to mention in the above post, that credit card transactions & addresses via authorize.net display üöä ok.

So, at this time customers using paypal express will experience text encoding issues if special characters are used, but otherwise the cart has no text encoding issues.:bigups:

Update: Been getting a lot of paypal orders from Europe lately, every address with a special character is displayed incorrectly in the order email, admin and ZC address books.

Allée

Our work around is to send each customer an email after their order stating the correct address.

Allée

We then change their customer address in the admin, which displays correctly. So far we have been unable to change the order address, using phpmyadmin, any entry whether the phpmyadmin browser is set to unicode or western or the phpmyadmin collation is set to utf8 or swedish latin1.

Regardless of our fixes, this makes of look bad...is there anything that can be done?

Another update: Some how changing the customers address, set the corresponding order status to 0 which makes the order disappear from the admin display, searched for the order # and the order was displayed.........I then changed the order status and the order appeared again. whew!

I then went into Phpmyadmin > order table: the paypal API address looks correct because Phpmyadmin is dispalyed in unicode, all credit card orders with special charcters are displayed ```
�

I changed the phpmyadmin browser to Western  and  selected the order with the paypal API address  and replaced the address ```
Allée
``` with ```
Allée
``` now all the customers addresses are correct in ZC admin and in ZC..

Im not sure what will happen when or if this customer returns, in terms of the  address match, but at least for now when they return to my shop, their information will be displayed  correctly and inspire confidence to place an order to be sent to  ```
Allée

I seem to be talking to myself on this thread, but I hope my info will help others and perhaps shed some light on this issue for the ZC developers.:lookaroun

I'm in the same boots, unfortunately my php skills are way below average; I saw this when using the standard IPN: I have the ugly monsterized accented characters on the paypal side, express checkout however pushes the characters right thru, no ugly chars!
OK, it gives me the error 10401 when using hungarian, but that's something else, IPN does rounding correctly. but just thinking that maybe the codebase from the express checkout can be reused in the standard IPN... I don't know.
(1.3.8a here too with Hungarian language/currency added)

Hi,
I have been in touch with Paypal on this and their only suggestion is to log on to Paypal, Profile and then change Language Encoding.

This - however - does not solve the problem.

The problem seems to be that Paypal posts the customer information back in the encoding set in Paypal (e.g. utf-8) but no matter what Zencart CHARSET is defined, the result is the same. My site (https://www.4evershop.com/shop) supports Danish, German and English - and no matter what language I have chosen, the result from Paypal is the same. It even changes the delivery country to United States, which is not what Paypal posts.

Has anybody solved this - 3 year old - problem with Paypal Express and Zencart?

Hoping very much for an answer.

Jens