Strange characters when moving to a new server

Hi All,

I’m pulling my hair out here.

I have a site running on a live server without any problems.
I zipped all the files and backed up the database using phpmyadmin.

I then uploaded the zipped file to a new server, unzipped it, created a new database and ran the exported SQL file against the new database.
Edited the config and the System Setting table...everything at this point work fine.

However:
All the content now seems to have very strange characters showing up all over the place.
Eg....
1. all hyphens (-) have changed to (—)
2. (He’s) have changed to (He’s)
and the list goes on

Does anyone have any idea what caused this and how to fix it?

thanks

The character sets of the two databases don’t match.

Remove the new one, and create a new database making sure the character set and collation, as well as the connection charset, matches the original.

Both database are using:
MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
MySQL connection collation: utf8_general_ci

Is MODx using UTF-8 as well?

Have you looked in the DB to see if the actual tables and fields are in UTF-8?

Did you convert the character set and/or collation of the original DB after there was data in it? If so, the data itself is probably still in Latin1.

Hi BobRay,

Modx is using: Unicode (UTF-8)-utf-8
The tables and content are in: latin1_swedish_ci

I did no conversion, just a simple export of original and import to new database

Quote from: garthswest at Oct 09, 2010, 03:29 AM

Hi BobRay,

Modx is using: Unicode (UTF-8)-utf-8
The tables and content are in: latin1_swedish_ci

That’s your problem then. MODx is trying to use utf-8 to display Latin1 data.

Since you have the DB backed up, you could try using the advanced option in setup to use Set Names to Latin1.

You could also try a new import using PhpMyAdmin and specifying that the character set of the file is Latin1. Dealing with character sets is a black art so I’m not sure what the best option is at this point.

Hi Bob,

I downloaded your cdc app, haven’t tried it yet though.

I edited the modx config file and made this change:
$database_connection_charset = ’latin1’;

now everything seems fine. Could i leave it like this or should i rather use:
UTF-8

I’ve got the CDC script working for Revolution (it should also work with all versions of Evolution but I haven’t tested it).

You might want to give that a try to prevent future problems. Be sure to download the newest version:

http://bobsguides.com/convert-db-utf8.html