I just upgraded from 1.8 to 1.9+
and it some of my titles and course text's I keep finding werid Charcters.. I am not sure what it is that is causing this.
Has anyone else run into this issue?
KJ,
I've seen this before, but I'm surprised this would happen as a result of an upgrade from 1.8 to 1.9. Because both versions of Moodle use Unicode (UTF-8) character encoding.
For starters, go to the View menu of your browser (IE or FF) and move your handy dandy mouse down to Character Encoding. What encoding is shown as active (with a check mark, bullet, etc.)? It should say Unicode (UTF-8). I'm guessing in your case (at least when you are on one of the pages with weird characters on it) it says something like Western (ISO 8859-1). If so, try clicking on Unicode and the weird characters should be replaced by the correct ones. But that's just a temporary solution, unless you're happy with having to change encoding on your browser every time you use Moodle -- and have your users do the same!
The next question is, what language pack are you using? I'm guessing Spanish (you probably don't have this problem when you select English). Go to your language pack (a subdirectory of lang under either the main Moodle directory or the data directory), open the file moodle.php, and look for the line that begins
$string['thischarset'] =
The rest of the line should say
'UTF-8';
If it says something different, like iso-8859-1, change it. But that probably won't completely solve the problem.
Check the configuration of your webserver. For example, if it is Apache, this is a conf file in the conf subdirectory of the main Apache directory, probably httpd.conf. See if the default character set (DefaultCharSet) is UTF-8. If not, change it. That should solve the problem. If you don't have access to the conf file because you are using a commercial web host, ask tech support what can be done to change the default webserver character encoding.
RLE
I've seen this before, but I'm surprised this would happen as a result of an upgrade from 1.8 to 1.9. Because both versions of Moodle use Unicode (UTF-8) character encoding.
For starters, go to the View menu of your browser (IE or FF) and move your handy dandy mouse down to Character Encoding. What encoding is shown as active (with a check mark, bullet, etc.)? It should say Unicode (UTF-8). I'm guessing in your case (at least when you are on one of the pages with weird characters on it) it says something like Western (ISO 8859-1). If so, try clicking on Unicode and the weird characters should be replaced by the correct ones. But that's just a temporary solution, unless you're happy with having to change encoding on your browser every time you use Moodle -- and have your users do the same!
The next question is, what language pack are you using? I'm guessing Spanish (you probably don't have this problem when you select English). Go to your language pack (a subdirectory of lang under either the main Moodle directory or the data directory), open the file moodle.php, and look for the line that begins
$string['thischarset'] =
The rest of the line should say
'UTF-8';
If it says something different, like iso-8859-1, change it. But that probably won't completely solve the problem.
Check the configuration of your webserver. For example, if it is Apache, this is a conf file in the conf subdirectory of the main Apache directory, probably httpd.conf. See if the default character set (DefaultCharSet) is UTF-8. If not, change it. That should solve the problem. If you don't have access to the conf file because you are using a commercial web host, ask tech support what can be done to change the default webserver character encoding.
RLE
That was the first thing I checked was the encoding and it all matched up. I went through and corrected all the pages except for the Spanish pages beacuse I do not know Spanish.
The language pack is standard English.
Apache web server is also UTF-8.
Who knows what caused it, but I fixed it by just deleting the extra characters from the courses.
The language pack is standard English.
Apache web server is also UTF-8.
Who knows what caused it, but I fixed it by just deleting the extra characters from the courses.
KJ,
If you were able to delete the extra characters (presumably from the database), then they obviously were not an artifact of the encoding in the webserver/browser. But if you just delete them, you will be left with missing letters in Spanish words. For example, Espaol instead of Español. The n with a tilde over it was being represented as Ãf±. I was somewhat surprised, btw, that it was replaced by four characters instead of two. Did you have those course titles before the upgrade? Very strange.
RLE
If you were able to delete the extra characters (presumably from the database), then they obviously were not an artifact of the encoding in the webserver/browser. But if you just delete them, you will be left with missing letters in Spanish words. For example, Espaol instead of Español. The n with a tilde over it was being represented as Ãf±. I was somewhat surprised, btw, that it was replaced by four characters instead of two. Did you have those course titles before the upgrade? Very strange.
RLE