Some Japanese characters showing up as ?*

[keithsl]

This is pretty strange. Our whole site is based around vBulletin. We use a lot of Japanese on the site.

We have no problems with the Japanese inside the actual forum. However in our news section, we just recently had a problem. Basically our news section parses the news with vB's BBCode system. I've discovered that it for some reason is turning japanese characters into ?*. However it doesn't do this inside the forum. If I turn off the bbcode parsing, the japanese characters show as normal. It isn't doing it to many characters but enough to make it hard to read.

Here is the code I'm using:

$do_html = true; $do_smilies = false; $do_bbcode = true;
$do_imgcode = true; $do_nl2br = true; $cachable = false;


require_once('forum/includes/class_bbcode.php');
$parser =& new vB_BbCodeParser($vbulletin, fetch_tag_list());
$pagetext = $parser->do_parse(
$text2,
$do_html, $do_smilies, $do_bbcode,
$do_imgcode, $do_nl2br, $cachable
);

Of course, $text2 is the text coming out of my database that contains the Japanese.

We've been using this system for over a year and it has worked. I haven't noticed that it has messed up Japanese before but it might have. Like I said, if I comment out that code, the Japanese shows fine. So is there something I'm missing?

[keithsl]

Does anyone have any ideas on this? I know one of the specific characters is 篭