I'm working with sites that include Arabic content, which is in Unicode. I've done several samples, mostly using WAMP (dumping a Drupal installation into Uniform Server), and they've worked fine.

I'm now trying to do it in a LAMP installation (www.anhosting.com, using Cpanel and Fantastico for the installation) - and every time I enter Arabic text in a node it previews correctly, but when I save it all the text changes into ?????? ?????? ??????.

I've tried this twice - once with the default 5.1 installation and once on another that I've updated to 5.2 - and the results were the same.

On reading through the support for this problem it appears that it's generally due to the database having the wrong encoding, which is what I thought at first. However, that appears not to be the case - the site documentation says Charset: utf8, Collation: utf8_general_ci.

Any ideas? I'm really baffled here. For reference, here are my setup details:

Drupal

Item Value Operation 
Site Name Al-Madina  
Version 5.1  
Configuration file sites/default/settings.php  
Install profile default  
Cache Disabled  
CSS preprocess Disabled  
Clean URLS Disabled  
Cron Last run 54 min 15 sec ago  
Anonymous Anonymous  
File directory files  
Download method Private Go to setting 
Content menu links Show all menus  
Default theme box_grey  
Teaser length 300  
Default filter format   Go to setting 
Operating system Linux 

Webserver

Web server Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635.SR1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.28 OpenSSL/0.9.7a PHP-CGI/0.1b  
Server name www.kview.info 

PHP

Php version 5.2.2  
Safe mode   
Memory limit 16M  
Upload max filesize 2M  
Magic quotes GPC Enabled  
Magic quotes runtime Disabled  
Register globals   
Session cache limiter none  
Session cookie domain .kview.info  
Session name PHPSESSID  
Session save handler user  
GD version bundled (2.0.34 compatible)
FreeType support (Enabled), Jpg support (Enabled), Png support (Enabled)  
CURL version 7.15.3  
Multibyte support Enabled  
XML support Enabled  
Zip support Disabled  
Zlib support Enabled 

Database

Database type MySQL 
Version 5.0.24 
Host localhost 
Name http://kview.info/madinatest 
Charset utf8 
Collation utf8_general_ci 
Database URL mysql://kviemin8_drpl4:33XMik8c5ozD@localhost/kviemin8_drpl4 
Database prefix - none - 
Privileges USAGE 

Comments

adam_b’s picture

any help? please?

dingo001’s picture

Bump number 2, I am interested as well, my site shows french text but hiccups on devnagiri, all I see is ???

adam_b’s picture

Someone who knows much more than me about these things took a look at the setup using myPHPAdmin, and found that the site documentation above notwithstanding, some tables were encoded as latin1_swedish_ci. Presumably this is some problem with the Fantastico installer?

Instructions for fixing it:
- if you have CPanel, go to "MySQL® Databases", scroll to the bottom of the page, and choose "phpMyAdmin"
- inside phpMyAdmin, under the "Database" drop down box, choose the database used by your site
- under "Actions" near each latin_swedish table, click on the second icon
- you will see the table details; click on the "Operations" tab
- there's a "collation" field. From the drop down list, choose utf8

chandar’s picture

I am working on using UNICODE for Tamil Language and when I had problem in display of this unicode content, I browsed through this thread.

As per Adam_b's suggestion, I changed all tables to utf8_general_ci

But still I could not get the display in unicode. Only ?????? are displayed. What could be the reason for this?

Appreciated if I am given any direction on resolving this?

Thanks in advance,
Chandar

ps: I used fantastico for remote instatllation.

adam_b’s picture

I haven't done any further work on this issue, but it seemed in the end that the problem was definitely related to the Fantastico installer creating incorrect tables. I made several Arabic installations afterwards without Fantastico and they worked fine.

All I can suggest is to not use the Fantastico installer, but to do it manually which isn't very difficult.

chandar’s picture

Is there any guide or instructions available to manually install from the client PC? I do not have full access to the server where the site is hosted.

Chandar

adam_b’s picture

eg http://drupal.org/getting-started/6/install

or you might be able to install using Uniform Server (www.uniformserver.com) which I find much simpler for development work

chandar’s picture

Thanks,

based on your input in the thread above, I first changed the type at DB level, then at table level but didn't work. Then I did changes at the field level and now it works. Seems the changes done on the higher level are not flown down if done through Fantastico.

Thanks Anyway for your prompt directions to resolve the issue.

Chandar