Show Chinese Character within an English Forum

[stageducky]

I would like to know how to show chinese characters in  an English Forum. I have already read some post and have tried changing server setting to English UTF-8 and also tried English British UTF-8 but it still show a "peace face and question marks" Any idea what's wrong?

[CapriSkye]

the database encoding needs to be in utf-8 too, go into phpmyadmin see if you are using it.

[stageducky]

MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8) in my phpmyadmin and
phpmyadmin v2.11.9.1 is set to English there is no option for UTF-8 but there are option for Chinese etc. But my forum is in English so I shouldn't be setting it to Chinese right? Please give further advice if possible. Thanks

[CapriSkye]

what's your mysql version?

i think you are seeing utf-8 on phpmyadmin's frontpage, that's for default character set, not necessary mean the database for smf is using it. click on your database and it should tell you which charset its using.

if your db charset is in utf-8, forum will show english and chinese properly, doesn't matter what language its set to in admin section.

[stageducky]

MySQL version is 5.0.45-community-log

I clicked on my db and in the collation it is indicated "latin1_swedish_ci" I clicked on operation and found the collation setting do I choose "utf8_general_ci" or "utf_unicode_ci"? There are many other choices under utf8.

For my Forum language setting, it has to be utf8 too? I remember there was a reason why we have to set it to English previously. I forgotten the reason.

Also do you know how to type "8 )" without it changing into a smiley face?

Please advice, thanks!

[CapriSkye]

that's why it's not showing the characters then.

i might not be correct on this, but if you just switch the db from latin1 to utf8_general_ci, old posts will still be in latin1. you'll need to export your database, convert it utf-8, then import it as utf-8.

in your forum, you'll need to set it to utf-8 for English, download english utf-8 language pack first, then it should show up in the drop down menu.

[Sarge]

I answered in your other topic.

[stageducky]

Thanks Sarge, I read the posts in the link you stated and will try it out and see if it works. Thanks very much.

[Sarge]

Let us know how it goes.

Meanwhile, I'm locking this topic, since it's a duplicate of the other one.