Problem with some punctuation characters not correctly displaying
 

I have not been able to nail this down accurately enough to determine its exact scope but I am finding that I get lots of ? symbols instead of what should be pretty standard characters like '

But I find that when I post special characters almost all of them work fine... Yet sometimes the users post and I get entries in them like this:

"The other day I saw John aka ?slider? Blake at the field and he was..."

clearly the user was attempting to put something in inverted commas or single quotes but they did not translate.

I find that I can post almost anything ¢fi›‹€⁄∞§¶•ªº¢£™¡ and only get a few "?" - so does this mean that it has something to do with the client end character/language/font settings?

I note that here I can see all the special characters ie:

¡™£¢∞§¶•ªº
⁄€‹›fifl‡°·‚
(that was <option>+1-0 and then <shift>+<option>+1-0) No '?'s

but on my site I get:

?™??∞??•??
⁄€‹›fifl‡??‚

Can anyone tell me what they think is happening>?

TIA\Will

character collation mis-match.

server
client
db

One of those 3 are set wrong on the server.

Thank you. So where do I start in assessing the exact nature of the problem?

anyone help me with this one please?>

Have you tried asking your host about this?

yes, I am the host, the server is an HP ProLiant 360DL running Gentoo Linux and 2.6 Kernel with all the appropriate modules and components of apache2, MySQL and php. All diagnostics are fine and the system is working in every other respect. So I don't quite know where to start digging with respect to this issue with my vB.

On my second board - a completely unmodded 3.8.1PL1 I can't post any symbols - ie even 8? shows as 8

confused.

I note also that when I send the email

8? of separation

from round cube which is php and uses the same host same database and so on it comes through as 8?


Update: I notice that it is unchanged when the font is changed when posting;

BUT when I enter 6? in a post and hit "preview" I see the correct symbol in the preview post but upon submitting the post and the in any subsequent edit I see the 6?
On my modded forum the 8? shows as 8? and on the unmodded one I get only 8

further I find that my charset is (supposedly) correctly assigned and publishing as:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

I have made some progress on this by setting the character set on the board to utf8 and the collation in the database to utf8-general-ci - specifically the "posts" table - but I notice that a large number of the tables in the database are
latin1-swedish-ci !! very wierd since all my localisation settings are correct on my server and I don't think I ever changed anything in the my.conf or elsewhere to set this as a defauly.