Kryptronic Software Support Forum

Graham · 03-24-2016 08:06:43

To the best of my knowlege, I've not made any changes to affect this, but suddenly all the UK pound symbols on my site have become question marks in Firefox, IE and Chrome.

Apparently this is a problems with the character encoding, but it's iso-8859-1 which it's always been, so I have no idea what's making this happen.

Please can someone suggest a fix?

ADDENDUM: I've just tried Yen which comes up as a capital A with a caret over it and Euros which gets a small a with a caret.

All the other currencies give the right symbols either because they're not special ones (eg the $ sign) or because they're text eg AUD.

Another Addendum:

It seems to work ok if I change the Text Encoding setting in my browser to Western instead of Unicode, but I can't expect customers to do that!

I tried changing <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

to

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

in the display skin, but that didn't work :-(

Last edited by Graham (03-24-2016 09:25:03)

Graham · 03-24-2016 11:04:34

Update: I've made a temporary fix by going into System Dashboard > System > Component > Settings > Currency Settings: Conversions and Symbols and changing the pound symbol to £ but I don't think that's elegant and probably not the best way to do it.

Anyone got any other suggestions?

webmaster · 03-25-2016 06:56:25

I'd use GBP instead of £ there. That £ may be rendered as entered in some cases.

Your server has changed it's default output encoding type. Check with your host, something is wrong, as typical encodings are UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1, which both have valid characters for the pound symbol. The encoding you're running doesn't.

There may be a way to override the server encoding using a .htaccess file entry, if you're running Apache. On some servers this works:

AddCharset UTF-8 .php

Graham · 03-25-2016 09:58:08

If I put GBP it just comes up with those letters, rather than the £ symbol. I've now changed it to & # 163; (without the spaces as that renders on here as the £ symbol!) which also works.

I tried the AddCharset line in .htaccess for php and html, but it didn't work.

A few weeks ago I did try changing the php version to 5.6 instead of 5.5, but that broke the site, so I changed it back. I don't know if that would have affected anything.

The only other change is that I had an issue with the www version of my site coming up with a placeholder page on my hosts instead of the splash page, but the non-www version worked ok. My hosts suggested that the js caching rules in my .htaccess were exacerbating the problem because the duff version was being cached, so they commented them out of the file. I don't know if that was the issue, but it's not re-occurred recently.

I don't know that that would affect the £ symbol or page encoding.

Last edited by Graham (03-26-2016 18:29:58)

webmaster · 03-28-2016 07:20:25

Understood. They changed the PHP encoding. I'd try that .htaccess encoding change again as you probably tried it while everything was being cached.

Kryptronic Software Support Forum

#1 03-24-2016 08:06:43

Pound sign has suddenly become a black diamond with a question mark

#2 03-24-2016 11:04:34

Re: Pound sign has suddenly become a black diamond with a question mark

#3 03-25-2016 06:56:25

Re: Pound sign has suddenly become a black diamond with a question mark

#4 03-25-2016 09:58:08

Re: Pound sign has suddenly become a black diamond with a question mark

#5 03-28-2016 07:20:25

Re: Pound sign has suddenly become a black diamond with a question mark

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