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Extended characters, UTF-8 and ISO Western European question

pled Member
in General support
Hello,

After upgrading to 1.2 version, I have noticed some changes in my album. I know my configuration was probably wrong earlier, but I only need to understand what is means :

Before upgrade, although I was set to UTF-8, I could not use the on-browsing Ajax editor : extended french characters were wrongly stored. All was fine using the admin editing page.

Now, using 1.2, and selecting French during upgrade, I set UTF-8 too, bull all my text (description, comments) from previous albums had extended characters badly displayed when browsing. But I was able to use Ajax editor... I had to change settings to ISO Western European language to get all the text from previous albums displayed as expected.
And logically I cannot use Ajax editor anymore. ;-)

I understand that previous albums were wrongly strored for some reasons, probably me.
Is there a way to to get out of this, so that I could use UTF-8 definitely (which is the best) ?

Thanks,

Comments

  • pled Member
    I try to formulate this in another way :

    Is there a way to migrate existing albums created with ISO Western European setting to UTF-8 ?

    Thank you.
  • sbillard Member
    You would have to export all the database data, then change the database to UTF-8, then re-import the data after converting it to UTF-8.
  • pled Member
    Thank you for replying.

    I may have found what was wrong in my database settings : looking at phpMyadmin home page on my internet provider (and comparing to my local database), I found the following differences :
    - Both have characters set for MySQL : UTF-8 Unicode
    - But the line below "Interclassing for MySQL connection" (translated from french, seems to be "character set connection" variable) was set to latin1 on the internet provider database.

    I am a little bit stressed to perform export/import... ;-) afraid to loose the data ! (in disaster/recovery scenarios, the problems always come with the recovery phase !! and it is too late).

    I will then try to reproduce the case on my local installation, then if it works fine, I will do it on the online album, being more confident.
  • pled Member
    Hello,

    In case that helps some other people :

    The issue is fixed now (after some local tests). I did an export from MySQLAdmin, but only relevant tables, that are : zen_albums, zen_comments and zen_images.
    Then using a simple text editor, replacing all extended characters (such as é, ç, à, etc...) by the decimal code (&#"233"; and so on). I also changed at the top of sql file the CHARSET to utf8 and COLLATE to utf8_unicode_ci (was latin1).
    Then import the file again.

    Now having all my settings (database, zenphoto) set to utf8, I can browse all my previous albums and all is displayed correctly. And I can use the on-line editor as well.

    So all is fine now.
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