Pounds Sign

[akc42]

I can post here using the £ sign without problems.

On a forum I have just migrated from 1.1.11 to 2.0.4 All the original £ signs in posts have been converted to A£ 

If I modify one of the posts and convert to have the single £ sign, all I get is ? in the posts

On the posts where A£ is being displayed, I can look in the database with phpMyAdmin and edit the field, and it appears there to be a single £ sign also.

I have just changed forum language from English to British English, both tried with utf8 and without.  This doesn't appear to make any difference

So what am I doing wrong?

[akc42]

Found the solution.  Converted the forum and database to utf8

[MrPhil]

If all your £ signs were showing up as A£ (actually, the A should have a circumflex/hat on it), that means your database was in UTF-8 but your pages were being displayed in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1). If you did a conversion to UTF-8, hopefully nothing was done to the database itself, but merely added the UTF-8 setting for page display.

[akc42]

Yes, they were circumflex As

The update changed the collation on all the tables from latin1_swiedish_ci to utf_general_ci  but that was all that happened  as far as I could see.

This is a multi stage process of trial and error, and I discovered that the machine I had set up from scratch on my desktop was already urf8, where-as the one I had setup on my server gave this problem.  I looked all over for differences - but couldn't locate any

So is there a setting in the settings table that changes?

[MrPhil]

The default encoding/collation for MySQL is Latin-1/Swedish, so if you failed to change it to UTF-8 before importing a backup from a UTF-8 database, your data might have actually been in UTF-8, while the database (and the resulting page character set) were still Latin-1. Did you upgrade in place or import a backup? If you ended up with a properly working system, either by skill or by luck you got the database into UTF-8, along with its data, and the page encoding into UTF-8. There should be a database setting somewhere (IIRC, global_character_set in smf_settings) defining the encoding.

You should be using "utf8" language support, although for British English there's probably nothing in the prompts and labels that isn't ASCII (are there any £ in them?). However, if the pages are to be UTF-8, it will be looking for the "utf8" language files.