Seeing strange characters on the page after migration to new environment

I have a DataAssist site that shows funny characters in the db, but displays the correct bullets, curly quotes, etc in the browser. I recently tried migrating the code and an export of the db to a new dev environment and I'm still seeing those funny characters in the db, but they're also displaying in the browser, like so:

"...highlighting “not just for Christmas” ..."

Nothing has changed in the code between the two environments except for the credentials in the db connection file.

The live db server's charset is cp1252 West European (latin1)
The dev db server's charset is UTF-8 Unicode (utf8mb4)

I can't change target db server's charset.

I recently migrated a different DataAssist site that had the same funny characters in the db and that also displayed correctly in the browser to the same environment and it's displaying correctly in the browser.

Just unsure where the issue is since it's working on the one site and not the other. I can't for the life of me figure out what I did differently between the two.

Charsets can be set in the database, in the connection file, and in the HTML. All three need to be in sync in order for all characters to display properly.

It is possible your connection or page had a different charset causing this issue. I'd check the connection files to see if they have different charset settings.

Thanks, Ray. The php files all have a "<meta charset="utf-8">" tag in the head. I don't see anything in the connection file (below) that appears to be related to charset. Of course there's all of the files in the _mmServerScripts directory that I haven't checked. Would you have some time on Friday to go over some of this stuff with me? It sounds like you could find the culprit faster than I.

If you go into the connection settings UI you will be able to set a charset.... The connection file you have doesn't have one set.

I was able to remedy this issue on one site but not the other. The one that's working now is displaying strange characters in the db on both live and dev sites. When I added the charset to the connection script on the dev site, it corrected the issue and now shows bullets and curly quotes, etc.

On the other site, there are also strange characters in both the live and dev site databases. The live website shows bullets and curly quotes, etc. But after adding the charset to the connection script on the dev site, it still shows strange characters. Aside from the one line added to the connection script, the code on both live and dev sites is identical.

Not sure what to try next.

If you give me FTP access and a URL, then I can take a look.

Usually the charset can be set in the database itself, the connection, and on the html page, and if they are all in sync you shouldn't get strange characters (unless they are in the database that way to begin with)

Strange characters exist in the db. For some reason that's not a problem on the live site, just the new dev site. Do you just need access to the dev site?

Yeah... That's a tough one. Most likely there was a mismatch when the data was inserted or updated in the database, so it is wrong in the database itself. Sometimes that can be overcome by keeping the mismatch consistent, but really if it is wrong in the database you are just patching the underlying problem if you get it to work and it might be better to update the database to have the correct characters to begin with.

I'm perplexed as to why it's working correctly on the live site There's strange characters in the db and there's no charset in the connection script!

I've looked into converting characters manually in the db using find/replace, but that looks like a snipe hunt at best.

Literally seeing things like this everywhere: ’

Again, another site that I recently migrated had the exact same scenario and it's now displaying correctly simply after I added the charset to the connection script.

What would you recommend at this point?

The default charset may be different on your live site vs your new. You may be able to figure out what the default is and then update your dev server charset to match.