Extended ASCII

[SeekerSA]

Greetings

I am Admin on a Christian Forum using smf 1.1.3.  We recently migrated to another server which was done by and IT Consultant and we came up with these anomalies.  I will just quote a few.

” = (open quote ")

“ = (closed quote ")

’ = (single quote/apostrophe ')

These are but a few where members are copying + pasting from htm pages.  Initially, the posts were fine up to the migration and than all these extended ASCII chars came up.

I used the censored words to correct this but I am informed that this is merely a band aid fix and maybe the extended chars exist in the tables.  We were having problems with supposed duplicate primary keys and was wondering if this could have been the problem.

Many members use the Biblegateway . com for quoting scriptures and this often comes up as shown.

Joh 3:16 ¶ For God so loved...

And quoting from e-Sword Strong's lexicon, particularly with Greek we sometimes get a box (highlighted red), we do not seem to have this problem with Hebrew

G4413 πρῶτος prōtos pro'-tos

I can "erase" this all from the viewed text with Censored words but particularly the last one is suspect as the censored words does nothing to it.  If you have ever interrogated a database with notepad, all these chars are there.

I have read it is to do with the language file and passed that knowledge on to Tech support.  Could it be a bug in mySQL?

Any suggestions?

Regards

[Oldiesmann]

This kind of thing generally happens when the character set of your page isn't the same as the character set of the original text - particularly if the original page was in UTF-8. You may want to consider converting your board to UTF-8. See the SMF online manual for more info on this process