title: Strange Characters in database text: Ã, Ã, ¢, â‚ €,
body: <p>I'm not certain when this first occured.</p>
  
  <p>I have a new drop-shipping affiliate website, and receive an exported copy of the product catalog from the wholesaler. I format and import this into Prestashop 1.4.4.</p>
  
  <p><strong>The front end of the website contains combinations of strange characters inside product text: Ã, Ã, ¢, â</strong>‚ etc.  They appear in place of common characters like , - : etc.</p>
  
  <p>These characters are present in about 40% of the database tables, not just product specific tables like ps_product_lang.</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.silverstripe.org/general-questions/show/17036" rel="noreferrer">Another website thread</a> says <strong>this same problem occurs when the database connection string uses an incorrect character encoding type</strong>.</p>
  
  <p>In /config/setting.inc, there is no character encoding string mentioned, just the MySQL Engine, which is set to InnoDB, which matches what I see in PHPMyAdmin.</p>
  
  <p>I exported ps_product_lang, replaced all instances of these characters with correct characters, saved the CSV file in UTF-8 format, and reimported them using PHPMyAdmin, specifying UTF-8 as the language.</p>
  
  <p>However, after doing a new search in PHPMyAdmin, I now have about 10 times as many instances of these bad characters in ps_product_lang than I started with.</p>
  
  <p>If the problem is as simple as specifying the correct language attribute in the database connection string, where/how do I set this, and what to? </p>
  
  <p>Incidently, I tried running this command in PHPMyAdmin mentioned in <a href="https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/15709/strange-characters-appearing-on-websites-ascii-unicode">this thread</a>, but the problem remains:</p>
  
  <pre><code>SET NAMES utf8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE</strong>: PHPMyAdmin says:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p><strong>MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)</strong></p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>This is the same character set I used in the last import file, which caused more character corruptions.  UTF-8 was specified as the charset of the import file during the import process.</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE2</strong></p>
  
  <p>Here is a sample:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>people are truly living untetheredÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â¢ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚Â¬ÃƒÂ¯Ã¢â‚¬Â
    Ã‚ï† buying and renting movies online, downloading software, and
    sharing and storing files on the web.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE3</strong></p>
  
  <p>I ran an SQL command in PHPMyAdmin to display the character sets:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>character_set_client     utf8</li>
  <li>character_set_connection     utf8</li>
  <li>character_set_database   latin1</li>
  <li>character_set_filesystem     binary</li>
  <li>character_set_results    utf8</li>
  <li>character_set_server     latin1</li>
  <li>character_set_system     utf8</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>So, perhaps my database needs to be converted (or deleted and recreated) to UTF-8.  Could this pose a problem if the MySQL server is latin1?  </p>
  
  <p>Can MySQL handle the translation of serving content as UTF8 but storing it as latin1?  I don't think it can, as UTF8 is a superset of latin1.  My web hosting support has not replied in 48 hours.  Might be too hard for them.</p>