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Today when I opened my website I saw question marks instead of texts. Question Marks are showing in japanese and tajik languages. The strange is that inside database it is also ?(Marks). Does anyone know what is the problem? I have Joomla 1.5 and JoomFish for translating website language. Question marks are shown on all japanese characters. In Tajik language only in some characters are being shown ? marks. My website is navrasta.com

Cœur
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Firdavs Kurbonov
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1 Answers1

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I have had the exact same problem with a JoomFish installation on Joomla 1.5.

From time to time some of the articles would contain just question marks ("?")

Those articles would be lost and I would have to recover them from backups.

What solved the problem for me was to change the database to have my tables use the charset "uft8" and the collation of "uft8_general_ci". Previously I had "latin1_general_ci"

Please backup your database before you attempt to do this.

You should change the charset and collation for at least these tables:

  • "jos_content" - your articles are stored here in the default language
  • "jos_jf_content" - your translation are stored here.

(of course you need to replace 'jos_' with your actual table prefix)

Good luck and always do backups before altering the database!

Ilie Pandia
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  • I have set already utf8_general_ci fo all tables and collation also the same. Do you have any idea? – Firdavs Kurbonov Jan 27 '14 at 15:32
  • was this before or after you've noticed the problem? – Ilie Pandia Jan 27 '14 at 15:33
  • Yes, the database data is lost and it does not matter what encoding you use, it will still be "????????". But for me, after I've changed the enconding and collation AND I've restored the data from backups (keeping the new encoding intact) the problem did not show up anymore. So there is now to convert the "?????" into something meaningful, only to restore from a backup your articles. – Ilie Pandia Jan 27 '14 at 16:46
  • I will backup it, but I want to know why did it happen? – Firdavs Kurbonov Jan 27 '14 at 17:04
  • I was not able to reproduce the problem myself, but since the change in encoding seems to have fixed it, I'd have to speculate that it was an encoding translation problem that gets exposed by Joomfish. That does not answer your "Why" but it's the only information that I have. And I've been looking myself as well for a long time... – Ilie Pandia Jan 27 '14 at 17:11