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Topic: Can't install punBB (mangled character display)

I already mentioned this problem, but I'm opening a new thread to make things more clear and easy for people willing to help me.

When I do a fresh install of punbb (version 1.2.12) on a Linux Debian server ( PHP: 4.4.2-1.1,  MySQL 5.0.22), I can't type correctly some characters.

The problem is show in this post, but basically the "à" character becomes "?"

The mysql database was freshly created for this test forum.

I did a mysql dump of this test forum, here is an excerpt:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `trialpunbb_forums`;
CREATE TABLE `trialpunbb_forums` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `forum_name` varchar(80) NOT NULL default 'New forum',
  `forum_desc` text,
  `redirect_url` varchar(100) default NULL,
  `moderators` text,
  `num_topics` mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
  `num_posts` mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
  `last_post` int(10) unsigned default NULL,
  `last_post_id` int(10) unsigned default NULL,
  `last_poster` varchar(200) default NULL,
  `sort_by` tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '0',
  `disp_position` int(10) NOT NULL default '0',
  `cat_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

Maybe the problem is the latin1 encoding, I don't know. But my locale gives the following:

$ locale
LANG=pt_PT.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="pt_PT.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="pt_PT.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="pt_PT.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="pt_PT.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="pt_PT.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="pt_PT.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="pt_PT.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="pt_PT.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="pt_PT.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="pt_PT.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="pt_PT.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="pt_PT.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=pt_PT.UTF-8

Also, when I use the "Example" plug-in to introduce text, the following displayed text is correct.

Finally, and last piece of information, when I imported a previous punbb database (also formatted in latin1), the contents were correctly displayed in the forum). It's only the new records which are mangled.

Re: Can't install punBB (mangled character display)

I'm almost certain the issue is that your webserver is sending a header saying that all content is UTF-8 and that this takes precedence over the meta tag character encoding that PunBB sets. Try creating a .htaccess file in your forum root directory with the contents:

AddDefaultCharset iso-8859-1

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

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Re: Can't install punBB (mangled character display)

Thanks Rickard, you're dead right!

I now managed to correctly display the à character. Thanks a lot!!