Thread

The Russian content looks fine in phpMyAdmin, but when it is pulled in to the front end, and also the EE control panel, the characters are displayed as question marks. The pages are all set to utf-8 like so…
<meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=utf-8” />

I did have to alter the fields to utf8_unicode_ci instead of latin1_swedish_ci which was the default before. Is EE doing anything that would corrupt the characters before they are displayed, etc?

Thanks,
Gary

Was this an import, Gary?  Or were these entered via the publish screen?

To answer your question, EE does not alter the characters, it displays them as it gets them from the db. UTF-8 is a good choice, in general, but it means that the content in your database needs to be in utf-8 as well. Tihs can be tricky, sometimes. Also, “latin1_swedisch_ci” only concerns the collation of your database, it is no problem to store utf-8 characters in there. In other words, no need to alter these fields.

In closing, a link to the site in question would probably be quite helpful 😊

try search in file ....../system/db/db.mysql.php:

$this->server_info = @mysql_get_server_info();

replace

$this->server_info = @mysql_get_server_info();
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

Please let me repeat: No hacks to EE are required to get Unicode aka utf-8 to display correctly. I have been doing it (with German characters) for ages.

It was an import, not something entered thru EE. I changed the database collation because the characters weren’t being stored correctly in MySQL when I imported from a CSV, and changing it to utf-8 fixed that.

I’ll PM you the URL on Monday when I can trouble shoot it.

Thanks.

What version of MySQL are you using? This info. is displayed by phpMyAdmin.
Also check what the *database* encoding is set to. Some hosting companies still set latin1 rather than utf-8
as default database encoding, and don’t allow you to change this. In this case, all the tables in the database
will also be latin1 by default unless you specify otherwise. Your post suggests that this is the case.
(This may give you headaches when you migrate to a server with utf-8 default). 
Also you are correct that, in phpMyAdmin, “utf8_unicode_ci” or “latin1_swedish_ci” does not mean
just “collation” as shown on the screen, it means “character set = utf-8” and “collation = unicode_ci”
or “character set = latin1” and “collation = swedish_ci”.
The suggested hack (I haven’t tried it) presumably tells EE to treat the database as utf-8 by default
even though the hosting company has set the default to latin1 and MySQL reports this to EE.

MySQL client version: 5.0.22
MySQL charset:  UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
MySQL connection collation: utf8_unicode_ci

If you check the page using the W3C validator, does it confirm that the page encoding is set to UTF-8?

http://validator.w3.org/

EDIT: The reason I ask is that I did some work for someone a while back where I wasn’t personally hosting the site, only to find that the server was overwriting all page encoding (regardless of what was set in the HTML).

sabremarketing, I would like to take a step back here. Can you please show us a link to a site where it’s happening? It’s really impossible to troubleshoot otherwise.

I just sent you another message, apparently the first one didn’t send.

Gary

Thanks for your email Gary. We are looking into it for you.

Any progress? Let me know if I need to change anything in the DB, or re-import, etc.

Thanks,
Gary

Gary:

I’m sorry for the delay.  How much Russian data did you import? 

Kind Regards,

-greg

sabremarketing,

Can you try the following wiki article.Note that these changes are made at your own risk as we do not support hacks. I don’t believe you need the htacces bit as your pages seem to be serving up the correct header.

EE Wiki : Use UTF-8 with russian lang