Answered Migrating from Evo to Revo - Foreign characters not displaying

Hi everyone:

My friend and I am trying to move from an older Evo site to Revo, using the provisioner. Definitely committed to Modx, which has satisfied me completely.

However, foreign language content is not being handled right, its Chinese characters and they display as question marks ?? ?

To be clear, the foreign contents display fine now on the Evo install. Its only after moving them that the problem comes up.

I have seen some threads on the forums where people have had display problems, and its usually related to the character set and collation values of the databases (and the fields and data within). I found this great thread that helped explain this very clearly here, that you can't just look at the values on the databases but also must look at the character set on the modx install and the values of the tables, fields and data itself:

https://forums.modx.com/forums/thread/13854/strange-characters-when-moving-to-a-new-server

My friend is the database admin, and I have asked him to check all these values out asap. He said the two databases both are set to UTF-8, but the above thread explains that's not the end of the story. There also is a temporary linux box which is used in the migration process which could potentially be causing the problem, we are checking that too.

My question right now is, could the provisioner be causing this problem? Is the provisioner grabbing the data using a character set at all? Or does the provisioner just grab whatever is there, not mess with it, and dump it into the new database?

Hi shamblett thanks for your reply. You are exactly who I wanted to get feedback from, as the maker of the provisioner!

I think what you are trying to say is its probably not the provisioner which is causing the problem, and that is my hope. We are building a new Revo install and can configure these values however we want, so we can control that, whereas the provisioner we can't fix if it is causing the problem.

Also, if the provisioner did this then I think or hope that someone would have mentioned it. I find a lot of posts in the forums about problems with displaying characters, and exactly none of them are about using the provisioner. I suppose a lot of people have used this great tool over the years, so probably we would know by now if it had this problem. So, fingers crossed.

Also, my friend did another test run and said that the Chinese came through fine this time, but there were some problems with the templates chunks and snippets. I am not sure what changed right now, but if the content of the site is getting through ok then I am happy, as the templates and so on are not a problem to move manually.

I will update this thread and welcome any other replies, comments, suggestions, whatever. Hopefully we are in the clear and this post might be useful to others.