TOPIC: encoding problem in Hebrew

Hi, i was looking for a solution for this on the forum but couldn't find one.
when i get a comment on my website in Hebrew it is shown as ????? only.
the admin gets a mail in Hebrew that looks fine!.
my language is set to utf-8 (but i also tried setting the frontend to hebrew instead of autodetect)
i am using Joomla 1.5.14 . and joomla comment 3.26
any clues?

Which web browser are you using? Can you view Hebrew text in other programs like Notepad? I assume you can, because the E-Mail looks fine as you said.

You might need a language pack update on your computer. Try testing in Internet Explorer 8 to see if the letters appear. But make sure that you can see correct hebrew letters in any other program first on your computer - just to make sure that your computer has the correct language pack and fonts to support these characters.

Hi,
just to verify my website is in Hebrew. so EVERYTHING is hebrew BUT the submitted joomlaComment. as i am using utf8 (both on my joomla website and AFAIK on joomlaComment) i don't think the language should matter

Oh ok. Obviously we have a problem with JoomlaComment then Unfortunately I think we will have to wait for Daniel on this, language and character conversion is something I know little about Plus I only work on JoomlaComment4.

I actually do remember that a user was having the same question marks ???? problem with Russian language (or something that uses Crylic letters) but I think that was JC4. Anyway, you may have to wait a while until Daniel can attend to this. Or upgrade to JC4 and then I could help

what is joomlacomment's database collation?

check it with phpmyadmin

Hi Daniel,
yes! that seems to be the problem, should i uninstall and install with a different settings (the tables are still empty) or do i need to change every column desperately.
oh, BTW all my DB is utf8_unicode_ci except the comments that are set as latin1_swedish_ci does this mean that my server is that way or that the DB is not set correctly?

ok, i ended up changing each and every field as i was impatient. and it works great!
but i am still interested to know how should i have installed it in the first place

spektory wrote:

ok, i ended up changing each and every field as i was impatient. and it works great!
but i am still interested to know how should i have installed it in the first place

Reinstall/reconfigure the database and choose the coalition as utf8 instead of latin1

Changing the individual tables is not enough, because the default is still latin1 it seems. That is, when a Joomla component creates a NEW table, it will use the latin1 default instead of utf8.

The component should work without problems now.
As jonus said - your default collation seems to be latin1, since we don't specify utf8 while installing the tables are installed with latin1. All other components that don't specify a database collation while creating the tables will have that problem.