problem with character encoding

[gdfhghjdfghgfhf]

I have a weird problem related to characters encoding on my website

 

I have using a phpbb3 forum, and i have a french and russian forum.

 

I have built a menu showing the last posts of all forums

 

My problem is that when a post title includes weird character (french characters like "é à â î Ç" or russian characters) it will display incorrectly

 

I don't understand why, because the characters are displayed correctly inside the forums

 

What do i have to do?

[cags]

Are you setting the encoding type of the page... with either something like this in the head section..

 

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />

 

or with the PHP header() function?

[gdfhghjdfghgfhf]

i already tryed that, just tryed again and it doesnt change anything

 

see by yourself:

 

http://www.anarcho-punk.net/

 

this is the script where the problem comes from (i include() this menu on the front page)

http://www.anarcho-punk.net/last2.php

 

As you can see the russian topic name is written "????????"

 

but when you click on the link, everything is good:

http://www.anarcho-punk.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1981

[cags]

Had a quick look at the headers sent with your site, the difference between the working one and the other one seems to be...

 

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

 

Try calling this at the top of your page...

 

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");

[gdfhghjdfghgfhf]

if i put it in "last2.php" menu it will write an error message saying the header has already been sent

 

So i replaced the current charset with your code in phpbb header's template..... But i still have the same problem

[nrobi]

The header() call must be the VERY first thing in the file. No newlines, no nothing. The alternative is to turn on output buffering then you can pretty much put it anywhere you want.

[gdfhghjdfghgfhf]

The header() call must be the VERY first thing in the file. No newlines, no nothing

So this is probably the problem.

 

I need to set UTF-8 in the left menu of my site.

 

So if i put the header() call inside my left menu script, it will not be the very first thing in the file when index.php loads

 

Even if i put the code in the first line of "last2.php", i get this error:

[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /last2.php on line 1: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /cache/tpl_Dark-Shines_overall_header.html.php:2)

 

so i have tryed to put the PHP code inside the beginning of "overall_header.html" but it doesn't change anything

[nrobi]

If the problem still remains.... is there any differences in the MySQL code for the homepage and viewtopic.php? There may be a line like: mysql_query("SET NAMES 'charset_name'");

 

Where charset_name is UTF8, utf-8, utf8, or UTF-8.

 

Something to try in addition to the header() call if it still isn't working.

[cags]

I did a quick search and came across somebody that claims this solved their problem using...

 

mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET utf8");
mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8");

 

... which is a slight addition to nrobi's suggestion.

[gdfhghjdfghgfhf]

WOOHOO! thanks a lot cags, it worked!

[cags]

Glad it's fixed for you btw, can you mark the topic as solved, (bottom left corner).