Problems with special characters

[Tomzl]

I just started ona a Slovenian translation of vBulletin and I'm having a few problems with some characters. I created a new language and assigned the win-1250 coding to it. Everything appeared to be fine and all the letters were being displayed correctly when suddenly some letters were replaced with

& #269; 

in the translations. I believe this is a representation of the letter in the iso-8859-1 coding but I see no reason for this since I'm using win-1250. I could not search for those phrases which included that letter anymore if I didn't search for the changed code. When I exported the xml file of the translation, it said the coding was iso-8859-1 eventhough I have win-1250 specified.

I used the replace function to replace & #269; with the correct letter. Everything was fine again for a few days and now the same letter in some phrases is displayed correctly and in others it is not. When I look them up in vBulletin phrases, they are both displayed the same way, only when I go to view the forum, the display is wrong in some places.

I also noticed that while in IE the letters were displayed correctly, they were not in Firefox. Before this change everything worked fine in both browsers. What is messing up my second language?

[Colin F]

Could you export the language and post it here, so I can test with it please?

[Tomzl]

I exported both the versions. The version Slo2 is fine on both IE and Firefox, while version Slovenscina is only displayed correctly in IE but not Firefox. You can see the problem if you look at the text for FAQ and Search on the index page (lines 274 and 482 in the xml files).

The funny thing is that both versions show the SAME correct text when I edit them in the admin panel in IE. For example, search for "Pomo" part of the phrase Pomoč (FAQ) and you will see that both versions display the word exactly the same in the admin panel eventhough the final output in the browser is then different in Firefox. IE will always show the correct letter no matter how it is entered but Firefox will show two different characters.

So far the only way I have found to make it work in both browsers is to replace the problematic letter with & #269; (I put a space between & and # because vBulletin automatically changes this code).

Eventhough I have win-1250 in the language settings, the xml output says iso-8859-1. I've been using phpBB up to now and I think the reason is that vBulletin still uses the ISO-8859-1 coding to enter the data in the database. When I compare my databases the problematic letter is entered differently in the phpBB database. The vBulletin enters & #269; in the database instead of the letter itself.

Is there a way to change all the coding (including the databas) to win-1250?