It seems that the utf 8 characters are not displayed correctly anymore.
Any idea how to fix this?

Regards,
Bogdan

Maybe you could run the charset normalization tool which is built-in with the latest versions.

As you told us you can't upgrade right now, I compressed the required files to add that tool to your current version. Please check the zip file and do the following:

1) Make a backup of your database
2) Make a backup of the following files: /blogs/inc/tools/tools.ctrl.php, /blogs/inc/tools/views/_misc_tools.view.php, /blogs/inc/tools/model/_system.funcs.php.
3) Replace those files with the files included in the zip.
4) Run the new tool: Check/Convert/Normalize the charsets/collations used by the DB (UTF-8 / ASCII) at Dashboard > Tools > Miscellaneous.

I recommend you to restore the original files, because this modification is just a quick way to get access to the normalization tool and see if it helps with your issue.

Regards!

• chartset_tool.zip (13 KB)

Hi,

Thanks for your help.

I did all that, and the upgrade seems to be completed successfully (see bellow). I checked and all the tables from the database have now "utf8_general_ci" collation instead of "latin1_swedish_ci " (the collation before the upgrade). Unfortunately the "?" characters are still displayed instead of " - " or " ' ". Do you have any other advice?

Loading module: _core/model/core.install.php
Loading module: collections/model/_collections.install.php
Loading module: files/model/_files.install.php
Loading module: sessions/model/_sessions.install.php
Loading module: messaging/model/_messaging.install.php
Loading module: maintenance/model/_maintenance.install.php
Normalizing evo_antispam... OK
Normalizing evo_basedomains... OK
Normalizing evo_bloggroups... OK
Normalizing evo_blogs... OK
Normalizing evo_blogusers... OK
Normalizing evo_categories... OK
Normalizing evo_coll_settings... OK
Normalizing evo_comments... OK
Normalizing evo_country... OK
Normalizing evo_cronlog... OK
Normalizing evo_crontask... OK
Normalizing evo_currency... OK
Normalizing evo_files... OK
Normalizing evo_filetypes... OK
Normalizing evo_globalcache... OK
Normalizing evo_groups... OK
Normalizing evo_groupsgroupsettings... OK
Normalizing evo_hitlog... OK
Normalizing evo_itemsitem... OK
Normalizing evo_itemsitemtag... OK
Normalizing evo_items__prerendering... OK
Normalizing evo_itemsstatus... OK
Normalizing evo_itemssubscriptions... OK
Normalizing evo_items__tag... OK
Normalizing evo_itemstype... OK
Normalizing evo_itemsversion... OK
Normalizing evo_links... OK
Normalizing evo_locales... OK
Normalizing evo_messaging__contact... OK
Normalizing evo_messagingmessage... OK
Normalizing evo_messagingthread... OK
Normalizing evo_messaging__threadstatus... OK
Normalizing evo_plugin_democracy_44_A... OK
Normalizing evo_plugin_democracy_44_Q... OK
Normalizing evo_plugin_mail_sender_17_reports... OK
Normalizing evo_plugin_mail_sender_17_uploads... OK
Normalizing evo_plugin_protected_posts_24_pass... OK
Normalizing evo_plugin_save_and_review_34_postdata... OK
Normalizing evo_plugin_starrating_20_ratings... OK
Normalizing evo_pluginevents... OK
Normalizing evo_plugins... OK
Normalizing evo_pluginsettings... OK
Normalizing evo_pluginusersettings... OK
Normalizing evo_postcats... OK
Normalizing evo_sessions... OK
Normalizing evo_settings... OK
Normalizing evo_skinscontainer... OK
Normalizing evo_skinsskin... OK
Normalizing evo_slug... OK
Normalizing evo_subscriptions... OK
Normalizing evo_track__goal... OK
Normalizing evo_trackgoalhit... OK
Normalizing evo_trackkeyphrase... OK
Normalizing evo_users... OK
Normalizing evo_usersfielddefs... OK
Normalizing evo_users__fields... OK
Normalizing evo_users__usersettings... OK
Normalizing evo_widget... OK
Changing default charset of DB...
Upgrading done!

Regards,
Bogdan

Please upgrade to b2evolution 6.6.5. It will fix the issue.

Version 4.1.7 is very old and doesn't work well with PHP 5.4. We fixed the issue in recent versions of b2evolution.

You can run mysql query to replace question mark with "-".

And what happens with his real question marks? :D

The ? replaces 3 characters: - , ' and "
So, even if I have no question mark at all in my posts (which is not true) I still can't replace all the questions mark with just "-" character :)

You have an issue with UTF-8. You should NOT change the content of your DB. You should just upgrade and be done with it.