ImpEx error after customer number is entered (and accepted):

[Mike1969]

Hello all,

Attempting to run ImpEx on vbb4.x ...
Just after my customer number is accepted, at the next screen, I am getting the following ImpEx error:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/nameofmywebroot/www/forums/impex/ImpExConfig.php:1) in /home/nameofmywebroot/www/forums/impex/impex_auth.php on line 22:1)

Successful
Redirecting

But there is no redirect and the ImpEx hangs there.

Any ideas?

[Trevor Hannant]

Check the ImpexConfig.php file an make sure there are no spaces at the top of the file - <?php should be the very first line

[Mike1969]

No obvious extra spaces, but just to be sure, I re-extracxted the source file and very carefully edited with TextPad, preserving all formatting. Whatever was wrong with that file, it works now... (Thanks)

So....

I ran ImpEx and it appears to be running as it should. i imported all the Ikonboard db tables, and exported. All seemed correct, but upon checking the vBB, the only thing that imported seems to be the users (over 3000). No tables, or anything else. Its justa nice empty forum with 3000 users. Hmmm.... (not critical, as the iB forums are still running fine)... What could have possibly gone wrong to have NOT given any warnings, errors or failures through the entire ImpEx processing. (And through the Imp process all those tables, posts, threads, groups, etc etc were counted and numerated.... ImpEx found them and processed them)

Thoughts?

[Trevor Hannant]

Did you run the Final Import Steps:

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/impex_cleanup

[Mike1969]

Bingo!
Thanks so much. Seems the ImpEx could not have worked better for converting a large ikonboard 3.12a forum!

[Trevor Hannant]

Good to hear it Mike

[Mike1969]

Ok, the problems are getting smaller and smaller, and thats good.

Something i just noticed while checking the newly imported forum content; this Import (its all test work at this point) seems to have imported some message/post text characters as html code, i.e. a "$" is posted as " & #36;", etc.
(spaces added for clarity)

For example: someone posted "Selling for $15" and it was imported as "Selling for & #36; 15"
This is on every post that uses non alphabet characters (about 75% of all posts)

Is there some setting to fix this when the data is processed through ImpEx?

[Trevor Hannant]

Do they show like that in the Database or as the symbol?

[Mike1969]

Seems to be in the db as well
ex: "you & #39;ve" is found with a quick glance at one db table content.
Ive found words such as "I & #39;m" and "welcome & #33;" on the forums, etc.
(spaces added here to break output)

[Trevor Hannant]

Try running the attached Product to fix the data in your post table

**MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A FULL AND COMPLETE BACKUP BEFORE RUNNING THIS**

[Mike1969]

The postfix tool worked great for the &#chars. Thank you very much. Much faster and more thorough than running my individual SQL queries.

Now the only thing left is I have some sort of utf-8-->Latin1 conversion artifact whereas some <space> chars are displayed as Â*

The Â* is in the newly imported sql db table content also (but not apparent in the old utf8 source table). And it isnt all <space> entries, just some. On top of all this, running SQL commands doesnt detect the Â* either so i cant REPLACE them. It's a charset thing i believe. What to do?

[Trevor Hannant]

Is the new database the same collation as the old one? What's the language charset in:

AdminCP > Languages & Phrases > Language Manager

Also, have you uncommented the line regarding UTF-8 in the vBulletin config.php file?

[Mike1969]

Old db is UTF-8, but ive since "set it" to Latin1, (it appears the same on the old forums, so maybe it has no effect), the new db is Latin1 and thats what the new vbb sql db is running as.

vbb Language settings-
Language: en
HTML Charset: ISO-8859-1

I have not uncommented the line regarding UTF-8 in the config file.

[Trevor Hannant]

What happens if you change both the language charset to UTF-8 and the config.php file also?

[Mike1969]

I enabled MySQLi and used the default config of utf-8
I changed the language charset to utf-8 and the Â* entities are now just *.
So thats progress. Any other ideas?

Now if we can get rid of the * items (i dont think they are actually asterisks) can we then update the tables and switch back to Latin1?