Foreign characters encoding in Powerstore 3

Hi,
Using utf-8 character encoding in the pages and utf8_unicode_ci on the SQL Server side, storing foreign language special characters in the database results in a multiple character string (e.g.: “é” results in “é“).
In POWERSTORE 3 code (e.g.: /Admin/Products_Results.php) the substr() function is used (in this case associated with the PHP strip_tags() function, like shown below:
<td><?php echo substr(strip_tags($row_WADAProducts['ProductShortDesc']), 0 , 23); ?>
<?php if (strlen($row_WADAProducts['ProductShortDesc']) > 23) { echo "..."; } ?></td>
If the “WADAProducts['ProductShortDesc']” contain an “é” and this special character is on position 23 of the string, the the substr() function strips the © of the é (which is how the “é” is stored in the database) and the result displayed in the browser is nothing else but a “nice and confusing” &#65533;.
Does anybody have an idea how to solve that problem while retaining charset=utf-8 on the page level and utf8_unicode_ci for the database, the tables and the varchar fields.
One solution would be the use of charset=ISO-8859-1 on the page level but this is not what I want, since I need a broader character compatibility (mixing several foreign languages) and utf-8 appears to be just right !!!
Many thanks in advance
Dan

This type of update will be custom and not supported. I can think of one way that something like this could be done, if the problem is that the words are broken in between characters that need to be displayed together then maybe you can preserve the characters by looking for white space. If you can ensure that any whole values will be separated by white space then you can do a strpos to the last white space before the 23rd character. Here is a link to the strpos page on php, it has some useful info for this:

php.net/strpos

Hi Eric

I was too lazy last night to dig into the PHP docs.
Many thanks for redirecting me to the strpos().
The matter is now solved and works fine.

Best regards

Dan

I'm glad to hear that. Let us know if you have any other questions and we will help with whatever we can.