Question Marks replacing some characters in htm files

Question Marks replacing some characters in htm files

by Lindsay John -
Number of replies: 2

Good day,
We have been experiencing problems with htm files in our migration process from another LMS to Moodle (applies only to htm files produced in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint).  Question marks are appearing instead of long dashes,  single quotes (magic quotes I believe they're called), and repeated spaces.

In all the posts I've read, the question mark issue comes up for non-English characters when the default Character Set is not set to UTF-8.  I'm wondering if this is our problem as well. 

Our install is Moodle 1.5.3:
Fedora Core 2
MySQL 3.23.58
PHP 4.3.4
mbstring enabled
(OK status for all these in Moodle Environment page).

In order to test if this is a UTF-8 related issue, I then installed Moodle 1.6.3 on a different machine (running CentOS 4.3). I uploaded a couple of the htm files, and the same problem occurs.  Note though, this second Moodle instance  is not yet UTF-8, since the Environment page mbstring status says Check.  The Environment page also says that the MySQL version installed needs to be upgraded in order to guarantee that all data will be converted to UTF-8 in the future.

I'm still new to linux, and have been unsuccessful thus far in upgrading MySql or installing/enabling mbstring (GD also has to be installed/enabled).

My question is, with respect to the question marks, can anyone say for sure that this is definitely (or definitely not) a UTF-8 related issue?  We have quite alot of these htm files to clean up (a number of work-arounds have been discovered, but they involve processing each htm file, one at a time).  Our hope is that there is some setting to change which will allow all such files to display correctly.

Thanks,
Lindsay.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Lindsay John

Re: Question Marks replacing some characters in htm files

by Lindsay John -

Good day,
The problem has been resolved.  The solution actually, required a change in the settings away from UTF-8 in apache (commenting out the default character set which was set to UTF-8, and commenting out some of the mbstring settings).

The Microsoft produced htm files now display correctly!

Hope this helps anyone else who experienced this problem.

In reply to Lindsay John

Re: Question Marks replacing some characters in htm files

by Michal Blazke -

...required a change in the settings ...

Could you be more specific, please?

  1. if data in my MySql tables are stored as UTF-8, which charset has apache to use as default instead of UTF-8? Will I need to modify the way (php sources) the Moodle fetch those data too?
  2. which mbstring setting did you comment out?

Thanks in advace