Help with wrong characters being displayed

[Paddy Murphy]

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

[Lynne]

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?

[Paddy Murphy]

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

[Lynne]

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.

[Paddy Murphy]

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).

[Lynne]

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?

[Paddy Murphy]

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.

[Lynne]

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).

[Paddy Murphy]

Originally Posted by Lynne

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

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;

XML Error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 1

Originally Posted by Lynne

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. How do I change them all to utf8_general_ci ?

Thanks

[Lynne]

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.