multichar set in php

limited set of characters

[sixf00t4]

So i just moved to a new server running CentOS, and i am only able to use a limited set of characters, and some characters, such as exponents, little dots, etc, are replaced with question marks.

here is the error i get in phpmyadmin

The mbstring PHP extension was not found and you seem to be using a multibyte charset. Without the mbstring extension phpMyAdmin is unable to split strings correctly and it may result in unexpected results.

someone was trying to tell me the only way to fix this was to compile a custom version of php on the server, which is crap because it is obviously something that should work fine, and did work fine on the old server without a custom compile.

any tips or more info, let me know!

[sixf00t4]

bump

[encyclo]

I suspect that your new server's underlying charset might be UTF-8 rather than the old standard ISO-8859-1. A lot of newer Linux distributions are moving to UTF-8 by default. Your files may still be in a legacy encoding, which is complicating matters.

Are you using the standard CentOS PHP package?

[sixf00t4]

i am indeed running the default php package. Can you foresee any problems with changing the character set to ISO?

[sixf00t4]

and, just for good measure, can you detail what changes i should make? Thanks for your help.

[sixf00t4]

alright, just uncommented the default charset line in php.ini, and all is well! thank you very much!