????????? in place of special characters..

[hanuman]

Could someone help, I'm a bit lost..

As I administer multi-language site, comments should have the possibility of adding special characters..
When I tested this component on the demo site, characters were displayed correctly (āžšīļņķ); when I try to do the same on my server - they are replaced by question marks, like ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ... what do I do?

[BBC]

It has to do with your language coding at server, i believe.
Open your database with phpmyadmin and change character and collation to UTF-8.

[hanuman]

Thanks it helped!
I used this query:
ALTER TABLE table CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
on all tables concerning JComments..

[Balance]

Hi everyone!  

I'm also about to add jcomments to my multilingual website. But I've ran into the exact same problem.
As you can see in the first screenshot below, the special characters are correctly displayed in the comment title and body, but they are messed up in mouseover descriptions and other jcomment elements.

I've tried your above solution, but it didn't work for me - I've probably done it wrong somehow or overlooked a table.
I logged into phpmyadmin (didn't have to do something manually in there for ages) and for the following tables I used your query:

jos_jcomments
jos_jcomments_custom_bbcodes
jos_jcomments_reports
jos_jcomments_settings
jos_jcomments_subscriptions
jos_jcomments_version
jos_jcomments_votes


If I understood correctly I simply had to copy your below SQL-command and replace the "table" part with "jos_jcomments_reports" etc. for each table.

ALTER TABLE table CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;


Anyway all the jcomment tables now have successfully changed their code from utf8_general_ci to utf8_unicode_ci. I cleaned the cache but the special characters are still displayed as questionmarks.

So, what did I miss here? Did I miss a table or why else didn't it work? =\
Thank you very much for helping out!

[smart]

the special characters are correctly displayed in the comment title and body, but they are messed up in mouseover descriptions and other jcomment elements.

It looks like we've some problems with JComments language file's encoding. Check JComments' language file in Joomla's language folder (for English it placed here: /language/en-GB/en-GB.com_jcomments.ini).

[Balance]

Ah!

Thank you so much, you pointed me in the right direction.

Simply open the .ini file (obviously not the english one, the foreign one which is messed up) with the windows notepad editor or some other editor and simply resave it.  "Save as..." brings up the save window and there is a window where you can select UTF-8 and resave the file.

Thanks for your quick reply smart!

[smart]

Say me please which language file has incorrect encoding? And specify your JComments version. I'll fix this issue in next version.

[Balance]

I use Jcomments 2.2.0.2

It's the German .ini file that made those problems:  \htdocs\language\de-DE\de-DE.com_jcomments.ini
Can't say anything about other languages, though.