We’ve suddenly noticed that all the text entries containing special characters (mostly French letters with diacritics) have turned into character strings, for example the song title “C’était une bergère” has turned into “C’était une bergère”.
I’m less concerned with why this happened as I am in trying to see if there are any tools available that would allow us to correct these errors in batch rather than having to fix each one individually.
Help?
Did you upgrade recently? I know you said you weren’t as interested in how, but there’s a kind of problem that’s just caused by an incorrect “charset” setting in your db.ini file, which fits with what you’re seeing. This kind of problem mostly affects older sites.
You might try to add a charset = "latin1" line to your db.ini (or change the existing utf8 line there if it’s there), to see if that helps.
Thanks! Only thing I can figure is that a recent server-side upgrade (PHP) from our webhosting compnay threw things off kilter–assuming that’s even possible. That’s the only systems-level change I’m aware of.
It’s possible a PHP upgrade could have done this by changing the default charset for connections.
Did you try out my suggestion? It’s worth a shot as a simple fix to get things back to how they were before, and just rule in or out that specific thing as what’s happening.
Thank you! I peeked into the db.ini but didn’t quite know how to address it–would I just add that line below the other bits in the file?
Thanks
Yeah, if you don’t have a line that starts charset in there now, then that’s a decent sign this might be the problem.
You can just add a line
charset = "latin1"
at the bottom of the file, yes. And then check to see if the problematic characters look correct or not.
Thanks! Will give it a go!
THANK YOU! Totally worked!
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