Big problem

My webhost upgraded its servers and now I see in my messageboard that special characters aren't displayed properly :

Instead of showing "reïncarnatie" it shows "reXcarnatie" where X is a square. Same with the characters é, è, à,... When I look in the database with phpMyAdmin the words are nevertheless correct.

Now when I post a message that contains the word "reïncarnatie" for example, it is showed correctly on the forum, but in the database it is stored as reïncarnatie.

What do I have to do?

Simply don't post "reïncarnatie" anymore 8).

That's not the solution I want.

No, seriously, this is really a big problem as these characters are often used in Dutch language.

Probably, your new host is not set for original Dutch characters (I mean, in mySQL setup), they are kept probably in UTF8. We can not help here. By the way, why this is a problem, if forum is dispayed correctly?

Team,

These characters are not only used in the Dutch language, but also in French language, Swedish, Finnish,...

The charachters are displayed correctly in the messages that are posted AFTER the server-upgrade ( started yesterday ) but not in the messages that were posted before the upgrade ( more than 3000 messages ) although they are stored correctly in the database !!!

I really don't understand why the forum doesn't display them correctly ???

Really hard to say what the problem is. Welcome to open source :)

Probably, you can only write a converter which converts old symbols to new. Or contact provider and ask why this happened.

But how come MiniBB stores these characters in encoded form in the database ?

If you are using exact original encoding, there is no encoded form at all - they are storing as usual 1-byte symbols which are supported by your keyboard layout. But if you are using some another encoding (for example, you are using English character set, but also use Dutch symbols) they should be encoded with ampersand (for example: & #203; - something like that). It is done automatically by browser.

Let's start from scratch because it is getting confusing. Forget my messages above. I ask my question in a different way :



---> Right now, there are hundreds of messages that contain those special characters and they are stored correctly in the MySQL database. However, they don't show up correctly on the forum. How come ?

Answer is the same: miniBB does not convert any special symbols. It is reading data from database the way it's stored. If you were not experienced any problems earlier, and not experienced any problems NOW, when messages are posted - ain't this logic to ask provider what so clever they did to make this situation happen???

Team,

1 ) " Answer is the same: miniBB does not convert any special symbols. It is reading data from database the way it's stored. "

Apparently not. How come MiniBB doesn't display characters the way they are stored in the database ???

2) I contacted the hosting provider and this is the answer : " At a guess I'd say that the Apache upgrade has brought up a bug the original developers haven't taken into account. I'd say they should have been able to manually specify the charset to be sent for display. Remember, Apache simply outputs information and I'd be guessing that the default charset has changed between Apache 1 and 2 (for the better in my opinion). Contact the forum developers and show them the example. Mention that they may need to be able to manually specify the charset to be outputted to your visitors. "

???

Pascal
1) BECAUSE via upgrade your provider changed tables or some encoding. The answer is in 2)

2) Character set is given in language pack. I don't know which is for Dutch because I don't live in Holland (?).

This line is in the Dutch language file :

$l_meta='<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">';

So what do I have to do now ?

So, let me know two things:

1) BEFORE the upgrade - was everything functioning correctly, when you posted the message?

2) AFTER the upgrade - is everything functioning correctly, when you posted the message?

So it's about some characters like é, è, ë, ö, ó,... :

BEFORE THE SERVER-UPGRADE :

These characters were displayed correctly on my forum but they were stored in encoded form in the MySQL-database.

AFTER THE SERVER-UPGRADE :

- Messages on the forum that were posted before the upgrade : now the characters are stored correctly in the MySQL-database but they aren't displayed properly on the forum.
- Messages on the forum that are posted after the upgrade : characters are displayed correctly on the forum but they are stored in encoded form in the MySQL-database (just like it was before the server-upgrade)