Thread

Whenever I try to submit a entry where I use a special character (in my case, the Norwegian Æ, Ø and Å) that custom fields goes blank after submitting. Is this an EE and/or SQL-problem? What can I do to solve it?

Hi magnusland,

What version and build of EE are you using?

What type of custom field is it?
Is it a native text input or textarea? Or is it a third party field like Wygwam?

EE2.1.3 Build 20110411

This happens both to native textarea fields as well as third party fields (in my case Matrix).

magnusland,

I just tested with all 3 characters above on text inputs and textarea and cannot replicate.
What other add-ons do you have installed?
Was this a fresh install or an upgrade from a previous version or build?

I don’t have any other add-ons than Matrix installed and it was a fresh install.

I’ve actually had this problem once before recently — it was when I was developing locally on MAMP, but when I moved the files and database to an external server everything was working fine!

Hi magnusland,

There is a bug in the latest version of MAMP’s iconv, which is causing issues with unicode characters being lost.

http://forum.mamp.info/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=10846

I’d recommend dropping down a version until they get this fixed up.

-greg

Thanks for sorting that out, Greg! However the real issue right now is outside of MAMP, it’s on a hosted server. A quick fix for the problem is to use for instance WYGWAM for all the necessary fields as it encodes special characters into HTML entities…

Well, that was not a very healthy solution — if I want to use those characters in the title field and try to save the entry I get the “The Title field is required” error message… Same goes when I try to make custom fields etc.

I finally found someone else who had the same problem, and the posted solution also worked for me: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/163807/ Brandon Jones had the solution:

We were able to fix this by changing this line in your config.php from

$config['charset'] = 'UTF-8';

to

$config['charset'] = 'utf-8';

When a browser makes a request to your server and specifies “utf-8” in the accept-charset portion of the request header, your server appears to treat this as different from “UTF-8” and not handle the response correctly. I would talk to your server administrators about this; it’s not something we’ve seen before. In any case, that should get you up and running - can you confirm this is working now?

magnusland,

Excellent 😊 Nice one Brandon. That was a tough troubleshoot. Feel free to start a new thread if you have any more questions

Closing