We have some resources bought in from Cheltenham Courseware as well as other providers, which have up to now worked well in Moodle. Since the 1.9.6 upgrade (which may just be coincidence) I have had a number of complaints that 'uploaded html files' don't work in Moodle any more, yet do work from a memory stick, or local drive, or from the root of localhost (Apache). I've verified that claim and it's true.
I have traced the issue back to 'illegal characters' in the html files: loading one of the offending files into KWrite or Kate shows the ?-in-a-diamond icon which I can then replace manually with proper dashes or © & or whatever.
I have two problems:
1) I do not know how far and wide this problem goes. We have close to 1,800 courses and probably hundreds of thousands of files, so I can probably grep for the illegal characters and pre-emptively modify the files before anyone knows there is a problem.
2) I don't appear to be able to use iconv to modify the file automatically. If I follow the advice on this page (http://docs.moodle.org/en/Converting_files_to_UTF-8) which is to do the following:
...the page will load up correctly but with odd accented characters where the dash was. So it works, but not properly. I have had to guess at the input encoding and have tried a lot of variations and this produces the best results.
All suggestions gratefully received.
~Paul.
