Installation and special characters (UTF-8, ISO-8859-1)

[Hossie]

Hi,

I have a problem with the installation of a (german) vBulletin. I already posted at vbulletin-germany, but I got no responses (yet). I'm hoping I can reach a developer here who can help me.

I have an own server with PHP 5.2.4, mySQL 5.0.44 and Apache 2.2.6, so everything is current. I'm using Gentoo Linux, which enables utf-8 by default for all applications.

After "default" installation all phrases imported from the xml-files are cut-off at special characers (ä ö ü). It looks like that:

Themen: 1, Beitr: 1, Benutzer: 1, Aktive Benutzer: 1
Wir begr

mySQL Config looks like that:

character set client utf8
character set connection utf8
character set database utf8
character set filesystem binary
character set results utf8
character set server utf8
character set system utf8
character sets dir /usr/share/mysql/charsets/

I already tried setting "utf8" in config.php, which did not change anything.

What I found out so far:

- If I create a database in phpMyAdmin and manually change the charset to latin1_swedish_ci, phrases won't get cut-off, but special characters are printed as "?".

- If I use an external database from a hosting provider (which should have a good configuration for vBulletin), I get the same results.

- Converting the xml-files with iconv did not change anything.

Please help me!

[Hossie]

I solved the issue today, but it was very time-consuming and the hardest script installation ever.

For future reference, and to save some others from serious headaches, here's the solution. I wish Jelsoft could improve this charset thing, so that you at least get some warnings or "possible better values", maybe even an auto-detection.

- First create a new database with phpMyAdmin. Under Operations, choose latin1_swedish_ci as charset.

- The important things from config.php

$config['Database']['dbtype'] = 'mysqli';
$config['Database']['force_sql_mode'] = false;
$config['Mysqli']['charset'] = 'latin1';
$config['Mysqli']['ini_file'] = '/etc/mysql/my.cnf';

[Zachery]

This sounds more like a server issue/configuration than a vBulletin issue. Unless I'm mistaken.

[Hossie]

Not really, because any other script, from other BB software, to blogs and wikis, all ran without the slightest problem. :rolleyes: