I have also noticed this with Finnish language where letters like "ä" and "ö" get converted into "?".

It didn't happen when upgrading to 3.3.1. but it happened when I have switched servers and done import/export through phpMyAdmin.

Don't know what is causing it.

To test the new b2evo version I started a new database and ex- and imported the current database with phpmyadmin as well. I'll try it with ex- and importing it mysql admin. Maybe that helps.

Hypocrite wrote:

It didn't happen when upgrading to 3.3.1.

Bugger, it's starting to look like I made the wrong move!

Hypocrite wrote:

but it happened when I have switched servers and done import/export through phpMyAdmin.

¥åßßå wrote:

... sounds like your charset gets "converted" on an upgrade ... but I know bugger all about charsets ;)

I've had similar happen to me when places have upgraded ( not just evo upgrades, although quite a few have involved export/import via pma ) and my uber-cool hieroglyphs get munged into a demented chinaman with tirrets ( no offence if yer chinese eh? .... ohhh, just in case you have tirrets "sod yah, yer bastid, fuckin' arse, bastid, tit" :roll: ) ĥĥĥĥĥ ... charsets ;)

ohhh, and ģ is another ... not to mention single quotes

¥

Just opened the sql file I exported with phpmyadmin in a text editor. All special characters are replaced with cryptic characters. So there's the bug.

But now it gets difficult: I'm afraid of upgrading my current installation even though I don't have to export anything. Just in case something goes wrong: With mysql admin or phpmyadmin I don't get things back into the original state - with my big evo tables I have difficulties uploading them again.

Select "English utf-8" locale before upgrade and you'll be fine.
You can also set up a test server in minutes using [url=http://www.wampserver.com/en/]Wamp[/url] and try the upgarde.

Your data should be ok, just enable and select "English utf-8" locale from Global settings > Regional tab if you already upgraded with wrong (latin1) locale.

sam2kb wrote:

our data should be ok, just enable and select "English utf-8" locale from Global settings > Regional tab if you already upgraded with wrong (latin1) locale.

Thanks. That's the one problem I've always had with b2evolution, that special characters seem to not work (they work on my local server but not on my host's). So, I had to search and replace to change the special characters to XML entities in _globals.php and I couldn't use a desktop client like I was used to in WordPress. But I changed the default locale to use utf-8 and the special characters work like a charm now; no more question marks all over the place :)

It should get the information from the locale for the current blog instead of the global one, but oh well.

When exporting data from phpMyAdmin, I have noticed that you need to select a character encoding which supports your language. For example, when I am exporting a Finnish database, I select ISO-8859-1 and it works fine. The characters are correct in the sql-file.

The default character set when exporting from phpMyAdmin seems to be utf-8.

http://eisabainyo.net/weblog/2006/05/26/find-and-replace-text-in-mysql/ might be helpful for those trying to recover from this situation. I've never tried to do it with funky characters, but searching for a specific string and replacing it across the database is really neato.

Have a backup of the messed up database before you do it though otherwise it'll get even worse :)

Hypocrite wrote:

When exporting data from phpMyAdmin, I have noticed that you need to select a character encoding which supports your language. For example, when I am exporting a Finnish database, I select ISO-8859-1 and it works fine.

ISO-8859-1 would be fine for Finnish, I do believe (I don't know Finnish, but I'd love to study it). My primary blogging language is Esperanto, which has characters only available in Unicode (like UTF-8) or ISO-8859-3. The odd thing is that UTF-8 is much more supported than ISO-8859-3 (I know Netscape 4 supported UTF-8 but not ISO-8859-3).