[Bug / Issue] Charset Confusion

[OrganForum]

My forum was migrated from 4.2.5 to 5.4.5 and users are experiencing a problem with extended characters displaying incorrectly or truncating text. Searching here, I find that this is not a new problem, but it's not clear to me whether this is still an issue with the current software or a configuration issue. This was not an issue with 4.2.5.

As suggested here, I checked the Language Settings. The language is set to English (en) and the charset was set to ISO-8859-1. I changed the charset here to UTF-8 as suggest. This had no effect. The legend in the control panel for this setting reads:

This is the value of the 'charset' attribute for the HTML content type setting in the 'headinclude' template.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Looking at the html source from a page in the browser, this meta tag is not present. The 'headinclude' template is not part of VB5 Default style. I did find this code in the preheader template

 <vb:if condition="isset($charset) AND ($charset !== false)">
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset={vb:var charset}" />
 </vb:if>

so I'm assuming that the condition is not being met. Why would that be?

I'm also confused as to whether this line in the include/config.php file should be active or commented out.

// $config['Mysqli']['charset'] = 'utf8';

It is currently commented out as it was in the default.

As for the database, the default charset is UTF-8

Thanks

[Wayne Luke]

The character set should be set by a Server Response header. This is the appropriate way to do this these days.

Go into your AdminCP. Then go to Languages & Phrases -> Language Manager. Edit your language change your character set to UTF-8 (it is case-sensitive). Save the page.

Changing your config.php at this time could break your site even more.

[OrganForum]

Yes, I've done that. Server response header still showing IS0-8859-1
After the save the language setting shows:

This is the value of the 'charset' attribute for the HTML content type setting in the 'headinclude' template.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
so the case is correct.

[OrganForum]

Yes that was where and how I made the change. After flushing the server cache, the correct charset is now in the header response. Apparently, a cache flush was required and that's why I wasn't seeing the change in the response even a day after the change.

Hopefully, this will resolve the issue for our users.

Thanks for your help.