Help with wrong characters being displayed
 

Hi,

I have numerous characters coming through to my forum via RSS Feed Manager that are wrong.

For example;

' comes through as ' (I actually fixed this one by placing ' in the Replacement Variables)

But please help with these;

£ comes through as ?
“£ comes through as ??
“ comes through as ?

They're just ones I've noticed.

Is there a work around for this issue?

Thank you

If you look at the feed and see the page source, is there an encoding listed? And is it the same encoding used on your site?

Hi Lynne,

Thanks for the reply.

I went into great detail about this issue on the vBulletin forum here.

Would you mind taking a look there to see the issues I've been having please? I hope it will give you a better insight to my issue, if not please let me know what other information you need. I've since gotten new Google Alert Feed url's.

Here's one for example - https://www.google.ie/alerts/feeds/0...23403621179732

I'm then putting these feeds through feedburner and they are being posted here on my forum.

Regards

My 4.2.2 forum doesn't like that feed at all. I then went to the google alerts page and got a new RSS feed URL, and my site doesn't like it either. So, it may just be that those feeds can't be read by vbulletin.

I don't use that feed directly. I put that feed through feedburner to give me this - http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleAlert-Cannabis

I just noticed, the error characters in this link (shown as squares) are the ones that are showing on my forum as ? (a question mark).

So it isn't just the characters from the feed showing up wrong, it is those particular characters being used anywhere on your site that are showing up wrong?

In Language Manager > edit main language > what is your Language Code and HTML Character Set?

And in MySQL, what is the collation of the vbulletin tables?

Well in this feed that I'm using for example (http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleAlert-Cannabis) some characters like the € (Euro symbol) is shown as a square. And when it then gets posted to my forum via RSS manager, the square is displayed as a ? (question mark). This happens with other characters to like " also.

Language Code = en

HTML Character Set = ISO-8859-1

In phpMyAdmin most of my database tables are set to latin1_swedish_ci

I changed some of the tables (post, thread etc) to utf8_general_ci to see if this would fix the issue but it did not.

If it is showing incorrectly in the feed, then it certainly isn't going to correct itself in a post on your forum.

I would strongly recommend NOT mixing your table collations like that. You are going to cause yourself problems (not to mention that for utf8_general_ci, it is best to have the HTML Character Set be UTF-8).

Ok. I think it's time to seek an alternative to Google Alerts. If I use the Google Alert (https://www.google.ie/alerts/feeds/0...98089616524864) directly I get this error;

Ok. How do I change them all to utf8_general_ci ?

Thanks

I thought you had already changed some table collations?

Step 6 here explains it - http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum...ight=collation

NOTE: It is very very very important to make full database backups before proceeding if you are ever manually making any changes to your database.

Yes I've changed about 20 of the tables. But there's over 200 more, I'd prefer not to do each one by one. Is there a way I can change all the tales in one go? A query ?

I know how to back up my forum database :-)

I would think you would need to write a script if you want to do all the tables in one go.

Ok. Is there a guide to do that?

If you know PHP programming, you should be able to knock something up.

I don't. Can you point me to some guide or information on doing this please?

You want a guide on how to write PHP code? I love w3schools for reference.

http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp

Ok, all my database tables are now set to utf8_general_ci

I thought this would solve my problem but it has not.

When I set the HTML Character Set to UTF-8 I get squares for some of the characters (see attachment)

When I set the HTML Character Set to ISO-8859-1 I get � for some of the characters (see attachment)

See attachment for original characters in source article.

What are you using now for a feed? I tried a couple of the links you posted earlier but they didn't seem to be working.

Hi,

http://feeds.feedburner.com/google/qYjc

Thanks

Hmm...for some reason that seems to post only the article titles with a "More..." link, and all the titles seem to look OK.

I'm using;

For the Body Template.

I should point out that's not just feeds I having this issue with. Since I changed the HTML Character Set to UTF-8 from ISO-8859-1 it is also effecting usernames that contain a ?

See - http://www.forum.norml.ie/member.php?11

The username should be Ois?n Mac Giolla Bhr?de but it is being displayed as Ois�n Mac Giolla Bhr�de

OK, well, the only problem I saw in that feed is "It& # 39;s" that's supposed to be "It's". But when I look at the feed xml I see this:
An if you imagine decoding the characters, the &lt;b&gt;hemp&lt;/b&gt; later in the line becomes <b>hemp</b>, which correctly makes the word hemp bold in the post. But if you decode It&amp;#39;s you get It& # 39;s, which is what you see in the post. So it seems to me it's a problem in the feed, and I don't really see a solution to it (well, except maybe if you hacked the code to decode the post twice, but I'm not sure that wouldn't cause other issues).

Edit: BTW, I added some spaces in the above to prevent the codes from being interpreted.

I was able to fix the apostrophe issue with a replacement variable - https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2015/02/16.jpg

I don't mind the bold words so much. It's the ? & ? characters being displayed as boxes that I'd like to sort out.

Oh, OK, sorry. I remember seeing something earlier about replacement variables but I didn't pay enough attention.

I looked in to the other issue a little when you posted on vbulletin.com and I found that the feed seemed to be an ISO-8859-1 encoded document, with an xml tag that said it was UTF-8, and I think the rss feed poster code wasn't prepared to handle that. I would look in to it more but I didn't see those chars in the feed I was looking at.

Try changing this in your config.php file and uncomment this line.

so it looks like:

ozzy47, kh99 & Lynne thank you very much for your help with this issue.

I'm not sure why but for the last 4/5 days everything seems to be running smoothly. Maybe the database took a day or two to recognise the that the tables were changed to utf8_general_ci. So feeds are good.

The characters in the usernames were ok after I edited them from the box to the correct character.

Thanks again :)

Well glad to hear all is well now. :)