well.. everything was working fine on my local server.. but after uploading the site to the live server.. whenever I open a page, I fid it encoded in arabic (windows-1256) although it should be in Unicode (UTF-8)

and in firefox the site didn’t open.. I got this error message instead:

Content Encoding Error (content_encoding_error)

Server response could not be decoded using encoding type returned by server.
This is typically caused by a Web Site presenting a content encoding header of one type, and then encoding the data differently.

For assistance, contact your network support team.

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can any one help me with this issue please?

Are you specifying the proper encoding in your headers- see {charset}:

And does that output as utf-8?

yes.. in the html code it’s utf-8

well.. I guess the cause of this issue is the database import through phpmyadmin.. as I made a clean installation directly on my server and started copying and pasting the templates and content from my local server version.. and it’s working fine so far.. but I still have lots of content to copy and past :(

Hm- you’d want to have the dev db set to use utf-8 and then it should stick when you export it.  But if it’s already in there as something else, it’s more problematic.  I suspect that’s the case- and encoding settings vary depending on your mysql version- so that may be at play as well.  When I create a db, I’ll generally set the collation at that stage and avoid the issue later on.