I’ve been developing on our dev server for the last month or so and am finally ready to deploy to the live box. I’ve exported all data via phpMyAdmin, created a new database and imported tables. The issue is I’m seeing strange characters. Checking posts here even my dev server looks like it shouldn’t work!

HTML page encoding is as follows:-

My dev server phpMyAdmin homepage shows “UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)” as charset and “utf8_unicode_ci” as connection collation. The EE tables however show “latin1_swedish_ci” as collation. Browsing a table shows some strange characters but the dev site itself looks fine.

On the live site lots of strange characters appear both in templates and from weblogs.

Any thoughts on what’s gone wrong?

Thanks very much.

EDIT:

Some extra info. My dev install shows

character_set_client   latin1
character_set_connection   latin1
character_set_database   latin1
character_set_filesystem   binary
character_set_results   latin1
character_set_server   latin1
character_set_system   utf8
character_sets_dir   /usr/share/mysql/charsets/
collation_connection   latin1_swedish_ci
collation_database   latin1_swedish_ci
collation_server   latin1_swedish_ci

and on live where I’ve now created a UTF8 db shows:-

character_set_client   latin1
character_set_connection   latin1
character_set_database   utf8
character_set_results   latin1
character_set_server   latin1
character_set_system   utf8
character_sets_dir   /usr/share/mysql/charsets/
collation_connection   latin1_swedish_ci
collation_database   utf8_unicode_ci
collation_server   latin1_swedish_ci

Hope this helps.

Thanks again.

What do you have set for the default character encoding in ExpressionEngine?  Also, see this recent post =)

Default character encoding in EE is utf-8 in both installs.

After exporting data again yesterday and adding utf8 in place of latin1 in the exported file I have everything in the live database pretty much OK except for “?” instead of “’” (single quotes). This isn’t a HUGE problem but I just need to know that the live DB is now configured correctly for future foreign character entries (I’m localising into several European languages as soon as this is sorted) and that I can export from the dev DB OK.

Thanks very much.