Special/International characters displayed wrong [SOLVED]

Hello,

I installed Evolution from scratch and noticed that some spanish characters are displayed wrong like this: é±

These are the steps taken:
1) Installed Evolution with Database collation: latin1_swedish_ci
2) At "Site => Configuration" I changed "Language" to spanish. I left "Character Encoding" as default: Unicode (UTF-8) - utf-8. I did this change because the majority of my users need Spanish, and I want to give them a Manager login screen in that language. All spanish characters (at the manager) displayed correctly at this point.
3) I edited my user (manager administrator) at "Manager Users" => "User" and changed language to "English". I did this because as an admin, I prefer to use the manager all in english.
4) I created Template Variables and Resources that have international special characters. All special characters were displaying correctly at this point.
5) For my first spanish user, I created a new Manager account and set his "User" => "Language" to spanish.
6) After logging in with the spanish user account, all spanish characters for text belonging to the Manager display correctly: menus, options, etc. BUT...spanish chars for the name of documents and template variables (created on step 4) are all displayed wrong.

Please, your help will be really appreciated.

Thank you,

Mc

You need to use a utf8 collation for your database when installing MODx so it matches the charset you are selecting in the manager.

Quote from: OpenGeek at Oct 01, 2009, 09:44 AM

You need to use a utf8 collation for your database when installing MODx so it matches the charset you are selecting in the manager.

Hi Opengeek,

I didn’t have this problem with version 0.9.6.2 where the collation was latin1_swedish_ci and character encoding was set to: Unicode (UTF-8). I remember I converted the spanish.inc.php file to UTF-8 and the problem was solved. However, when I convert this same file on Modx Evolution I can’t access the manager anymore ’cause it just gives me a blank screen with: 

What can I be doin’ wrong?

Quote from: OpenGeek at Oct 01, 2009, 09:44 AM

You need to use a utf8 collation for your database when installing MODx so it matches the charset you are selecting in the manager.

Well, I installed everything again from scratch, and chose UTF8-general-ci and SET NAMES when installing. The Manager "Site" => "Configuration" is set to Unicode (UTF-8). I detected that the problem is present only for web content (not manager content), and the problem is basically this: Manager users with language set to "spanish" cannot see special characters created by Manager Users whose language is set to "English" and viceversa. For instance: if an English-language user creates a document with international chars, then a Spanish-language user logs in and will see all those chars displayed wrong and viceversa.

Any hints please?

Thanks.

Did you create the database manually before installing? If so, you need to make sure you create it with the collation you choose during install...

Quote from: OpenGeek at Oct 01, 2009, 02:57 PM

Did you create the database manually before installing? If so, you need to make sure you create it with the collation you choose during install...

Hmm, no I didn’t create the database manually, I mean I created it the usual way with "MySQL Administrator" (Catalogs => Create new Schema). I noticed though that the database is created by default with charset: latin1 and collation: latin1_swedish_ci, so I installed Modx again from zero, and when installing I chose the latin1_swedish_ci collation and SET CHARACTER SET method.

Again I created manager users and set english and spanish languages, but the problem persists: special chars created by one user cannot be seen by the other, and viceversa :’( (this never happened before with 0.9.6.2)

The usual way you described is manually, i.e. you didn’t let MODx installer create the database. You need to change the collation to an appropriate utf8 one before installing, as I said.

Quote from: OpenGeek at Oct 01, 2009, 04:41 PM

The usual way you described is manually, i.e. you didn’t let MODx installer create the database. You need to change the collation to an appropriate utf8 one before installing, as I said.

Oh, I thought manually was when typing the "Create database" command. Anyway, I installed Modx again and this time I let the installer create the Database. Installation went fine and I also verified that the Charset was set to utf8 and the collation to utf8_general_ci. But....after creating both manager users the problem persisted.

Something else must be wrong; are you sure both the english and spanish language files you are using are UTF-8?

Quote from: OpenGeek at Oct 01, 2009, 07:53 PM

Something else must be wrong; are you sure both the english and spanish language files you are using are UTF-8?

I had the idea that both files came in UTF-8 by default. Well, I converted both files to UTF-8 with Notepad++. The English user can log in to the manager, but the Spanish user sees only a blank page with  , so I cannot really tell if the special characters are displaying correctly for the spanish user.

Have you tried to reproduce my problem with a new installation, creating 2 users and setting spanish for one of them? I really don’t know what else to try.