9 replies to this topic

[JoshBowe]

Hi, having a bit of a problem with special characters coming through incorrectly in names and addresses.

We deal with a lot of customers from around the world that use accented characters in their name or address. For example Göteborg.

However when the customer registers their account it comes through as G��teborg, which obviously makes posting our stock out difficult as we don't actually know their address.

Does anyone have any idea how I can solve this? Thanks.

[JoshBowe]

Anyone have any ideas? Cheers.

[JoshBowe]

Bump.

[K3D]

It will be a character encoding issue. I'm rubbish in this area but will try and point you in a (maybe correct) direction.

It would appear that your database is possibly storing in UTF-8 (I base this assumption on the fact that you have the two inverted question mark symbols). UTF-8 uses two bytes to store the character code.

What then happens is that your website is possibly using another encoding (8859-1) which identifies those two bytes as two separate unidentifiable �� characters.

In Firefox you can see the currently used encoding (View - > Character Encoding). If it is anything other than UTF-8 and selecting Unicode (UTF-8) solves it then there should be an easy fix for your admin. Also check your database using phpmyadmin or similar to see if the data is being stored properly in the database.

[sedemik]

If you have tried to change encoding but still you have broken characters in your shop you can try the following trick. I helped me.

- Open files with Notedpad and save again it with encoding ANSI or UTF-8.

My language files has saved with wrong encoding and I saved them again with different encoding and the then character starts to work.

[apolyshow]

Take a look hear http://forums.oscommerce.com/topic/352946-mysql-and-text-out-put-to-front-end-and-etc/
Byt for the allready made customers you must make the from the begining in order to fix the problem. But all the new are going to be ok.

[JoshBowe]

apolyshow, on 09 February 2012, 08:31, said:

Take a look hear http://forums.oscommerce.com/topic/352946-mysql-and-text-out-put-to-front-end-and-etc/
Byt for the allready made customers you must make the from the begining in order to fix the problem. But all the new are going to be ok.

Hi guys, thanks for the replies.

I tried the solution you linked me to apolyshow, and it seems to solve the problem except for one thing. Now pound signs show up with an  in front of them like this "£" on every page, any idea why? Cheers.

[K3D]

Try updating your currency symbol in Localization -> Currencies

[JoshBowe]

K3D, on 09 February 2012, 11:57, said:

Try updating your currency symbol in Localization -> Currencies

Hi, this almost worked for the majority of the currency symbols but not all of them on the admin 'Orders' page. Any ideas?

[K3D]

I think the order totals pulled on that page are taken from the database so orders prior to the updated currency symbol will show incorrectly. You may have to research running an SQL statement in order to update the old orders.