Strange Characters with iRite and universal email

Hey,

I have setup a system for my client to send newsletters and there is an issue with odd characters showing up in the emails. Like this for example: 'Consumer Price Index – May'.

I'm pretty sure it comes from pasting into iRite from word, but how can I make sure it doesn't show that way in emails?

In iRite everything shows fine when the client pastes the text in, but the text is stored in the DB with the weird characters. What can I do to sort this out?

Thanks!

Shane

This is probably due to the charset settings. There are up to four places the charset will need to be configured for this to work:

1) In the html in a meta tag to define the charset
2) In the database itself to define the database charset
3) In the database connection
4) In the email server behavior

You can search this forum and the web for examples of how and where to update those charsets. UTF8 is a very broad charset that should support most characters.

Hi Ray,

Thanks. I have checked that the charset is set to UTF8 in all those instances but I still get problems. It seems that the only real culprit is double quotes that display as follows:
“Test Text”
Most others seem fine:
TEST CHARACTERS
 ` / ~ # , . ? : ; @ %^&*()!ӣ$%

I set the field in the database that holds the email content to utf8-bin - is that correct?

Thanks again for your time.

I'd have to take a look at the page to see if you properly updated it everywhere.

You can test to see if the database field is designated properly by adding that character to the database directly through phpMyAdmin or another database utility. If it is stored and retrieved correctly when adding it to the database directly, then you know your database field is configured properly.

It seems the offending character is double quotes, but the directional ones(“”). I tried adding them directly to the DB using phpMyAdmin and they showed up fine.
I have attached the email sending page that has the Universal Email behavior set on it. The behavior is set to UTF8 as are the DB fields and UTF8 is set in the heads of all the pages involved. Is there an iRite setting somewhere I have missed?

Did you add the mysql_set_charset() to your connection? Let me see you connection file.

No, I didn't. I've never encountered that so I'm not sure what to do. The connection file is attached.

Thanks again!

Try adding this to the bottom of your connection code:

mysql_set_charset('utf8',$ucConn);

Hi Ray,

I have tried that and the double quotes still display incorrectly.

Do they display correctly in the database when viewed directly from a database administration program like php myAdmin?

The problem may be how it is inserted and not how it is displayed. Make sure it appears correctly in the database first. If not, make sure you have all of the charset settings on the insert and update pages. Before trying to get it to display properly on the page you need to make sure it gets inserted properly to the database.