Thread

Hi,

My issue is very similar to this one: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/143376/P18/

In details, after updating my 1.6.8 installation to 2.1.0 all the greek characters appear as question marks. The URL is http://el.porcupine.gr/ but I have currently turned the site offline.

I have no idea what to do with my DB and I am afraid to touch it since I am a complete dump when it comes to such issues.

I host the website in Engine Hosting, so things must be a bit easier for admins to take care of it. Anyway, this is quite serious.
Thanks in advance.

Do you still have the original db dump? I suspect that your db was exported with a Latin-1 charset (very often the default option). Have you been using utf-8 before? Are you now?

Yes I have a backup of the DB before the update.

All tables and table fields used to have the latin1-swedish-ci collation.
After the update most of the tables and their fields are using the utf8-general-ci collation. The rest keep using the latin1-swedish-ci collation.

The problem seems to be the conversion of data. In the converted tables the data are stored as question marks instead of greek characters.

What do you mean by “Have you been using utf-8 before? Are you now?” UTF-8 is the default encoding of my templates, if this is you are talking about.

Thanks a lot.

All tables and table fields used to have the latin1-swedish-ci collation.

Yes. It looks like your data as then exported iso-8859-1 encoded, although it should have been utf-8. Take a look at this page for some background information.

What do you mean by “Have you been using utf-8 before? Are you now?” UTF-8 is the default encoding of my templates, if this is you are talking about.

There are other encoding options, as you know; iso-8859-7 comes to mind, e.g.

So, I guess I have to downgrade to the previous version of EE, re-export the DB and re-install EE 2.0.1.

Hmmm… not quite convenient. Especially when I need to do this for a bunch of websites. I wish there was a simpler way…

No, I don’t think a downgrade would be needed. Just make sure that you export your database as UTF-8 in the first place. The article I have mentioned also has a conversion script. I have run it successfully to clear up these issues. If you can’t run it yourself, just how large is your db dump?

I don’t get it. Sorry for being dump.
After the conversion what should I do exactly?

My DB is about 8.4MB.

If you take a look at the article Ingmar pointed to, it gives you a way to convert your existing database.

Using this solution would be beyond the scope of what we provide for support, but we might be able to assist a bit, or a member of the Professionals Network could probably do it.

As Sue said, you’d take the db dump, perform the necessary conversions and re-upload it again. Special care must be taken not to damage exp_sites, though. If you want you can send me your file to ingmar DOT greil AT ellislab DOT com and I’ll see what I can do.

Sue, Ingmar, thank you very much.

I just emailed Ingmar my database.

Ingmar is the king of encoding issues. 😊 He works a later shift, so you may not get a response until later.