Thread

http://test.ksba.org/insurance

You can see on the page above that some apostrophes, ampersands, commas and other characters
have been turned into a black diamond with a question mark in the center.

Can anyone explain why this is happening and how to fix it?

Old server Linux versions, and old versions of MySQL, supported the basic Latin (US) character set by default.
Newer server Linux versions, and newer versions of MySQL, support UTF-8 by default and (in MySQL) allow you to
choose the character set not only for each database but also for individual tables in a database.

As a result, if you move to a newer system then you should be able to keep the same database character set.
If you move to an older system, then it may not support the character set you were using on the new system.

Many EE users are non-technical, and many are going to change their provider at some time, so this
needs to be explained in the EE documentation as an issue that users should be aware of.

Moderator’s note: Split from this thread, moved away from Tech Support

Old server Linux versions, and old versions of MySQL, supported the basic Latin (US) character set by default. Newer server Linux versions, and newer versions of MySQL, support UTF-8 by default and (in MySQL) allow you to choose the character set not only for each database but also for individual tables in a database.

With all due respect, I think you are oversimplifying matters.

Many EE users are non-technical, and many are going to change their provider at some time, so this needs to be explained in the EE documentation as an issue that users should be aware of.

If you need that kind of knowledge (many people don’t), the ressources are out there. Personally, I don’t consider this an EE specific issue, in the way we don’t provide an introduction to XHTML or CSS in our docs. We’re happy to help if you’ve got problems, of course.

Closing this thread, keeping the feature request post for the same topic open.