UTF-8 charset in installation but ISO in language setting, is this correct?

[k12onos]

Hello,

I set up my SMF 2.x forum last week and I checked the box saying that I want to use UTF-8 character set in the installation page.

This is because even though the main language of the forum will be english, there will be conversation in other languages such as Japanese.

Now, when I see my the language settings in the admin panel, it says English with character set ISO-8859-1, sure I want to use English as the default language but I was expecting UTF-8 to be written in the character set there.

Is the language char-set written there only for the forum menus and such? and will it have an effect in the long run if there will be many posts in Japanese characters? I tried posting a post with Japanese characters and it shows up just fine.

But am I doing the right thing here? I set up UTF-8 in the installation process and have the ISO-8859-1 English language in the language setting.

If I'm doing anything wrong here, please tell me as I do not want to have any problem converting or such in the future, because preventing is better right

Thank you in advance, I appreciate your answers

[MrPhil]

Bring up any page on your site, and view the source (View > Page source). There should be a "meta" tag near the top -- what does it give for the "charset"? It should say UTF-8. Then, go into phpMyAdmin and see what it says your database encoding and collation are. The default for MySQL is Latin-1 with Swedish collation -- you want some variant of UTF-8 (probably "general" collation). If you want UTF-8, you should install the English-UTF8 language pack rather than the regular (Latin-1) English. IIRC, it contains code that sets the language and character encoding, so you want to make sure it has "UTF-8" rather than "ISO-8859-1" in it.

[k12onos]

It says UTF-8 on any page of the site and the mySQL says its UTF-8 too.

After I installed the UTF-8 English, Do I need to edit the english.utf8.php file again according to the mods I have installed?

[k12onos]

Bump.. Is there anyone who can answer this? Thank you in advance

btw I guess it's ok to bump since it has been a few days since the last reply 

[Illori]

yes you will need to make sure the language strings are in the new files for your mods.