Before I upgrade my forum to UTF-8 ..

[MobileCS]

I noticed that 48,000+ members on my forum do not have a language set. These are all the latest members. I saw in the instructions that I need to do a "SET lngfile = CONCAT(lngfile, '-utf8')".

My questions are :

Why is SMF not setting the default "English" to "lngfile" in smf_members in the database?

Do I need those rows to be populated if I have the forum set to "English (UTF-8)" and disable "Enable user-selectable language support"?


Also, I've noticed that half my mods do not have any english-utf8.php language files.

Do I need to create those files for them? or will they run fine without them after the conversion?

[shawnb61]

Blank = use the forum default.  You're good there as long as you change the forum default.

For english, there no difference between the UTF8 & non-UTF8 versions.  If missing text for your mods, I am pretty sure you can just copy them. 

[Kindred]

Not quite true... there is ONE line difference...ISO vs UTF8

[@rjen]

Not quite true... there is ONE line difference...ISO vs UTF8

I am pretty sure that line actually does not DO anything...

[Kindred]

It does. It's a setting and is required to actually DISPLAY the site in UTF8

[shawnb61]

It does. It's a setting and is required to actually DISPLAY the site in UTF8

Actually that's what global_character_set is for.  But it's true that the language string is used when global_character_set isn't set.

It's also displayed on the language screen.  If nothing else,  it's confusing to leave saying ISO & should be changed.

[shawnb61]

Note the original question & response was for language files for mods. 

[MobileCS]

Ok, just to clarify ...

If a mod is missing the english-utf8.php file, it will just use the normal english.php as a language file when UTF-8 is enabled?

[shawnb61]

I would give that a shot.  If the labels are missing, I'd rename it to the utf8 version. 

[MobileCS]

Are there any issues with using "utf8mb4_general_ci" character set in SMF 2.0.18?

I noticed on a fresh install, SMF uses a legacy "utf8_general_ci". MySQL says not to use this and to use utf8mb4 instead.

[shawnb61]

I suggest sticking with utf8.  The DB & code both need changes to properly support utf8mb4.

[MobileCS]

The utf-8 conversion went fine, but the htmlentities -> utf-8 had this error :

Unsupported operand types: int / string

Any ideas how to solve that? Do I need to run this conversion? What would happen if I skipped that step?

I've restored my forum backup so everything is fine right now and back to iso-8859-1.

[shawnb61]

If you do not do the step, there is no visible difference, though within the DB, some characters may be represented by html entities instead of characters. 

I.e., under the covers, they look like:
😪😫🥱😴😌😛🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓
Instead of:
😪😫🥱😴😌😛🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓

I have never seen that error before.  There should be more info in the error log...  Do you have any other info?  E.g., line #?

[MobileCS]

No errors showed in the error log. I don't see anything in Apache logs either which is really weird.