Hello there,

I’m running a multilingual page with german, english and frensh content and everything works fine. But there is one thing, that really confuses me and even after browsing this forum for a while I didn’t yet find the right solution for it.

What confuses me is this:

I have a list of titles and other fields with special characters. In frontend, everything works fine, but in backend I get results like this:

M?nchen - instead of: München
K?ln - instead of: Köln
?llbrunner Immobilien GmbH - instead of: Öllbrunner Immobilien GmbH

And yes, I do use UTF-8 encoding.

I know: it’s only a small bug, but I was wondering if there is a way to get rid of this.
Does anyone have an idea? - I’ve found some postings in here and there is a special guy for this kind of task I think…. isn’t it Ingmar?

If you want to take a look at the page go to:

http://www.weko-immobilien.com

Thanks a lot!

Hm- I visited the link, and you’ve actually specified encoding:

If you do a ‘reveal source’ on a control panel page, what’s the character set specified there?

On a control panel page, I get:

Hm, seems to be correct for me?
I’m a little bit confused right now…

Update: I’m not sure If I should switch to the ISO-8859-1 charset instead. Will I get a total confusion with my database then?

It looks to me like it’s working with ISO-8859-1, not utf-8.  Do you have it currently set to ‘Convert high ascii to entities’?  You don’t if you’re using utf-8.  It’s possible that’s a factor.

But just to see if you can get it displaying correctly, you could try going into ‘Admin- System Prefs- General Config’ and switch ‘Default Character Set’- that will alter the charset specified for backend display- set it to ‘ISO-8859-1’ and it will match what you’re using on the front end.

The alternative- switch the frontend to utf-8, which will most likely result in munged characters.  Then figure out why they’re ‘off’ (could be ascii issue), fix them, keep backend on utf-8.

But basically?  The frontend page you’re linking to has ISO-8859-1 specified in the header.

No, I did not use “Convert high ascii to entities” the same time with “UTF-8”.

I found out that it worked for me, when I switched to ‘ISO-8859-1’ for backend display.

But when I did that I’ve got problems posting new entries: I could save a new entry in backend - for example with this title: “Tästmakler” - but when I did so the entry didn’t show up on frontend at all and the title was corrupted to “Tstmakler” after saving.
So I switched back to “UTF-8” in backend.

I found out that I only have problems displaying special characters in backend with entries I imported via csvgrab. But when I post a new entry in backend with UTF-8 encoding on special characters are displayed correctly - both in title and in the entry form.

So what I can do? I could edit every single entry with special characters, change “M?nchen” to “München” eg., hit save and go on with the next one. There’s only one problem: there are too many :-(

Is it possible to set the character encoding that CSVGrab uses? I haven’t worked with that plugin - but if everything is working when added in the “standard” ways - then I would talk with the plugin author about the difficulty, as it sounds like something the plugin is doing during conversion.

Indeed, I think, the problem occurs during import of the data. I will try to find out who the author of CSVGrab is and’ll write him a note. Thank’s a lot for your help here. Guy’s (and girls): you are a great support team!

Thanks, Engelbert! I’m happy we were able to narrow it down.  That said - I would recommend using UTF-8 when possible. =)