Special Characters when changing PHP version

[Veee]

Hello,
today I went to switch the php version of my forum from 5.6 to 7.2 and what happened was that a lot of weird characters showed up in the words with special characters.

My forum messages are set to ISO-8859-1. I tried before to convert them to utf-8 and it just never worked out, it messed my whole forum.

It's recommended to use php 7.x... is there a way around this keeping words the way they are supposed to look like?

Thanks in advance!

[Arantor]

Go back to 5.6, back up through your host (not SMF admin), convert to UTF-8, go to PHP 7.0 or 7.1 (7.2 is not supported at this time)

[Veee]

Thanks for your reply, I appreciate it!

I went back to 5.6 and it still shows the weird characters....

I attempted to convert to utf-8 last year I believe and it didn't work. It showed the same that's happening now with the change to php 7. Shall I try to convert again now? Or will it show the same results? I think it's to do with the database which is set to utf-8 and the messages are in ISO-8859-1. :/ It's all very confusing to me.

[Veee]

Can anyone help? I have talked to my host but they don't know what to do...

[GigaWatt]

You could probably try this .

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8879564/latin-1-to-utf-8-database

Make a database backup before you do though .