Topic: Spanish ISO installation used with UTF-8 language files. Convert to UTF-8?

[osckar]

Hi:

Need some advice

I had a working installation of SMF but for some reason stopped working (internal server error) So I deleted everything (folder and files) and did a full re-install of SMF 2.0.2 with clean files.

Everything is working fine, used repair_settings.php as I'm using the same database with huge data in it.

The point is that with the old forum I used an iso-8859-1 language (spanish) but now when I'm reading messages and topics and everything on the public forum section, I see strange characters, so I installed the spanish utf8 lang file and now everything is fine.

My question is: as my data is in utf-8 and I'm using a utf-8 language in order for the right display of data, Should I convert my DB to utf-8? Because in SMF appear as iso-8859-1 (in my db manager hosting control panel is latin1_swedish_ci)

Thanks!

[agridoc]

A large upgrade would have cleaned the SMF files as well. 

From what I can understand Spanish special chars in mesages were not displaying properly with Spanish ISO languages files but they appear correctly with use of Spanish UTF-8 language files. I that correct?

P.S. As this is a documentation topic I will ask for splitting and moving to a support board.

[agridoc]

* Just a message for osckar to find the splitted topic.
Addition:
How to convert to UTF-8 link to guide
Re: It's all Greek to me .... A support topic with a similar (I believe) case to yours.

Don't be in a hurry, you may ask additional details.