Extended properties plugin and special characters

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Christine
Regular
Posts: 54
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 11:50 pm

Extended properties plugin and special characters

Post by Christine »

Hi, I was having a problem with Turkish and Greek characters not showing up in my blog entries (instead I'd get '???'), despite showing up on static pages. I went into the database and changed each table to utf8_unicode_ci, and the characters still would not show in the entry body, but now would show in the title and the editor. So I figured it was an entry plugin, and tried disabling and removing some, until I determined it was the Extended properties for entries plugin.

I don't know if this is a bug or something in the configuration I couldn't figure out, but if the former, I thought you might like to know. And if there is a way to keep this plugin and prevent this issue, I'd appreciate any tips.
Timbalu
Regular
Posts: 4598
Joined: Sun May 02, 2004 3:04 pm

Re: Extended properties plugin and special characters

Post by Timbalu »

The extended properties for entries plugin, serendipity_event_entryproperties, is one of the most used plugins and very near to the core.
I don't think it is the real troubleshooter in your case, since else we would have a lot of bug reports regarding that. In former times (> ~5 years) charset encoding issues were a problem far more often, but this is years ago! Search the forum regarding this.

So what it could be:
  • You touched Serendipity or Plugin files yourself and saved them with a wrong encoding, using a limited editor.
  • You have some charset inconsistencies walking in to the database or walking out of the database.
  • Your global database encoding collation is wrong
  • Your db table encodings are set wrong
  • Your db table encodings are set right, but old content did not merge properly
  • You have tried to find out youself and have made it even worse...
  • Your template does not set the correct charset to display.
The recommended charset is UTF-8, for years now.
Regards,
Ian

Serendipity Styx Edition and additional_plugins @ https://ophian.github.io/ @ https://github.com/ophian
Christine
Regular
Posts: 54
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 11:50 pm

Re: Extended properties plugin and special characters

Post by Christine »

Thank you for all the suggestions. I would suspect it might be something like the charset inconsistencies or old content not merging properly. I don't actually need this plugin enough to spend time right now testing it out.

I did manage to narrow down the problem though. It only occurs if 'Allow to cache entries?' is set to 'Yes'. I don't know if that gives you a clue to what might be happening.
Timbalu
Regular
Posts: 4598
Joined: Sun May 02, 2004 3:04 pm

Re: Extended properties plugin and special characters

Post by Timbalu »

Christine wrote:It only occurs if 'Allow to cache entries?' is set to 'Yes'. I don't know if that gives you a clue to what might be happening.
With old, not new entries, right?
Yes, this is possible. Since this option stores a copy of the entry with all markup in an extra table, which is serendipity(OrYourPrefix)_entryproperties. This happens to be very sticky. So this entry is ready to send to the users, without being parsed by other markup plugins, etc.
I assume it was not touched by a charset change your blog went through at a certain time in past. This makes it it quite easy to resume, since you can now open these entries one by one by your entrieslist - entryform and just save them again, when Cache allow is set to Yes. Or you do this via mysql and use the "export as" and "import" routines, according to your charset problem. I remember Garvin has left some valuable information regarding this latter in some of these old mentioned threads.
Regards,
Ian

Serendipity Styx Edition and additional_plugins @ https://ophian.github.io/ @ https://github.com/ophian
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