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.