Thread

I’ve been using EE 1. X for a long while and have published many entries on my site typing accented characters in the title or body fields and they’d be appear exactly the same on my website. I’ve changed to 2.1 but now when I type non basic ASCII characters in my title or body fields nothing is registered or published and after saving, the fields appear empty like nothing had been typed. If I use basic ASCII characters all fields work fine. In my Channel preferences I use French as the XML Language as in my General configuration. All my database or website settings are set to UTF-8. Please advise. Thanks.

Are you on the latest build? Any extensions? Was that an upgrade or a new install? Did anything else change on the server (db, PHP version etc.)?

HI ingmar,
It was a completely new installation with EE 2.1 Build 20100810. No extensions installed yet. I was moved to another server by my provider because couldn’t install on the previous one (older PHP version).  They use PHP 5.2.6 and are set for extended ASCII.
Do you think this problem is related to their Apache 2.0 server ?  Shall I verify first some other selections on my system which weren’t mentioned on my first post ? Thanks.

How about mod_security? Is that turned on?

HI Sue, always nice to see you around. Is mod_security a server parameter or in other words where do I verify this assumption please ?  I will give my server guy the opportunity tomorrow to test this bizarre reaction from my soft: he works for another website with another CMS on the same server and says didn’t face this kind of trouble on his part. Further investigation is coming on but will track this mod_security thing with more help. Thanks a million.

It’s an Apache module that can be used to restrict all kinds of “suspicious” behavior, accessing certain URLs, posting certain keywords, etc. all in the name of security. It needs to be constantly tweaked and updated. You can probably tell that I’m not a big fan. Either way, phpinfo() should list it if it’s in use (and doesn’t hide its presence, which it is capable of).

Thanks for your reply Ingmar. Will go back later to you guys because I need to find out some suspicious reaction from my Database. When I log in to EE I can’t change the language files at all in my translation tool when I apply accents to some word with all permissions set correctly.

Sounds good. We’ll be here.

Ingmar and Sue, I’ill get some delayed investigation tomorrow by checking the whole database. One thing I must add: when I tried to correct earlier some french language files carrying minor mistakes via the utility translation tool, I added an accented word in one field that didn’t have any and the consequence was that all fields carrying accented characters have been erased…. Crazy ? Will reload the french language pack soon to see if everything comes back to normal.

Hhi, Biscuiterie -

That’s not terribly crazy since the entire form is sent, and if the server is stripping those characters, it could do so then.  Have you checked with your host if mod_security is enabled?

It will be checked closely tomorrow Lisa among all database and server settings. It could not be done today unfortunately but will let you know as soon as possible. This whole thread has been sent to the server manager. Thank you all for your care.

No problems. We will leave this thread open for your response.

HI GUYS,

OK guys mod_security wasn’t enabled on my server so I had to find out for another explanation. I was moved recently from a previous server where I worked fine with EE 1.6.9 and UTF8 as the charset to another server because I couldn’t install EE 2.1 on the previous one which had a old PHP version. But my provider had set the new server with a different charset, ISO-9121 in fact and wasn’t aware of this. So I went to Admin—> System Administration—> Config file editor and made the change. Everything works fine now. Thanks again and sorry for keeping you busy with this. Cheers.

Glad things are working again. Don’t hesitate to post again as needed.