Text disappearing

[sirathos]

Hi

I've just made my first forum and when I try to enter a normal text into either a description of a board or a text in a topic, it get cut after a certain length.
I've tried to modify my board option to max length of text but no use.

Can someone help me with this.

Regards
Øyvind

[Colin]

Welcome to SMF!

I am sorry to hear that you are having trouble. How long is the text that you want to enter?

[Matthew K.]

Also what version of SMF are you running? It makes a difference in this scenario.

[MrPhil]

It's probably nothing to do with the length of the text. More likely you're cutting and pasting text from a Word document and there are "Smart Quotes" which are where it breaks. In such a case, many people have reported that converting to UTF-8 encoding has helped, as many browsers will convert Smart Quotes to proper UTF-8 characters (although this is not guaranteed!).

[sirathos]

Hi my forum version is SMF 2.0.1

Its not long its standard like 30-50 word or something, even a bit more, but a forum should be able to hande that much.
One of my post is getting cut in the middle of the 17 word, and some of the board descriptions is getting cut after 6-8 words.
I thought SMF forum should be able to handle that. And I try not to copy paste into my forum, if I do I go through notepad first so I get minimal coding.
I've tried to write directly into my forum topic and its still getting cut.

How do I convert to UTF-8 encoding?

Regard Øyvind

[MrPhil]

Going through notepad will not help. If it's MS Smart Quotes that are causing your problem, it's the encoding on your PC (usually Windows-1252). Microsoft borrowed what are supposed to be reserved as control codes to use for certain "typographically correct" quotation marks, em and en dashes, Euro symbol, etc. When rendered on a web browser, especially under Latin-x encoding, frequently these Smart Quotes codes are treated as controls, and break the text. As I said, many people have reported that converting to UTF-8 helps, as many browsers will automatically convert the Smart Quotes characters to the proper UTF-8 multibyte character codes. However, this is not guaranteed to happen!

In Admin, under Maintenance somewhere, is an option to convert the database to UTF-8. It's usually a good idea to also convert HTML entities (e.g., "€") to UTF-8 characters while you're at it.

[emanuele]

Another question: does your posts break in correspondence of the first "special" character? (i.e. some accented letter)

If so, it could be a charset issue: i.e. the database is UTF8, but SMF doesn't know and pushes data in non-UTF8 format.

One possibility would simply be to add:

Code Select Expand

$db_character_set = 'utf8';
to Settings.php before the last line "?>"...if it doesn't work you should see a small mess all around (just remove the line you added and all should come back.

[sirathos]

Hi

Thnx alot all of you....
Converting my database to UTF-8 solved the problem:D
I saw the mayjor isssue now with my letters æøå. My forum didn't know how to read them so it cut all the letters after the first æøå in sight:P

Thnx a lot again

Regards
Øyvind