Special characters list in transfer

[Ksepka]

Just wanted to note this - it appears many special characters (e.g., any accented vowels, m-dash, +/- symbol) were converted to "�" when the database was moved.

The new database appears to accept these characters if they are re-entered. I am just going to correct the lost characters by hand, but wanted to note it in case it matters in other areas (e.g. API).

[pdpolly]

This could be due to one of two problems: the collation on the database tables (which probably needs to be set to UTF-8) or the character set specified in the HTML headers (which probably needs to be set as follows: ).

[dleehr]

Thanks for pointing this out. I'll check the database tables. I may have omitted the UTF-8 setting when I created the database on the new server

[jimallman]

Reminder: Step 7 of the wiki's Installation page has suggestions for setting default collation and encoding. It's worth checking against these settings. See also this related issue on encoding of database dumps; as far as I know, the latest dumps should be correct and consistent throughout.

[dleehr]

Thanks @jimallman. The dumps were fine and the tables were all UTF-8, so the data was in good shape. It seemed to be the connection between PHP and mysqld. I did apply the steps mentioned in the wiki, but also set the following in /etc/my.cnf, per http://stackoverflow.com/a/10866836

[mysqld]
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
character-set-server = utf8

[dleehr]

@Ksepka this should be fixed

[Ksepka]

Thanks - looks like characters are restored (thank goodness, I thought i had another days work there...)