Encoding problem in Joomla 1.5/VM 1

[abrodski]

Hello everybody!
I'm still using Joomla 1.5 'cos I have Virtuemart 1.x.x
Recently I installed a pretty good component called JoomlaStat for web analytics. It works well, but there's one problem. It's does display those visited paged that are written in Cyrillics. I double-checked with hosting and I ran phpinfo.php test. What developers recommended is installed on the server. Now... I read at couple of forums that if one changes in PhpMyAdmin those table that belong to the component from Latin Swedish to UTF8 general_ci collation, it would do the trick. I went and manually changed everything to UTF8 general_ci, but in 95% of the cases, it all remained the same. Couple of places do show Cyrrilic characters correctly, but 95% is like that ? ? ? (just the question marks strings).
Any idea?

[penders]

...from Latin Swedish to UTF8 general_ci collation, it would do the trick.

Did you convert all your existing data?

[abrodski]

penders Thanks for your comment!
You're right... That's how the issue was solved!
Simply had to change every table and everything there was in them PRIOR to starting using the component (it's best simply not to visit the site until it's done!)
Now it's showing correctly! Probably the reason why it didn't work before, 'cos I ALREADY HAD visited the site PRIOR to changing the collation! And after visiting in the wrong collation, the ? ? data already had been accumulated in jstat pages table and even after the change, the system automatically showed what already had been stored there!
P.S. I even know why now some pages showed correctly back then. That's because FIRST visit to those pages was after the collation change!

[lucy24]

95% is like that ? ? ? (just the question marks strings)

That's the hallmark of UTF-8 data being interpreted as Latin-1 or some other one-byte encoding. It should be noted that the whole Cyrillic thing was almost certainly a red herring. It's what happens when a browser-- or text editor or any text-reading device-- is presented with a one-byte encoding it doesn't recognize. (Mine seem to like putting the text into Korean.) Good thing you were able to fix it retroactively, though!