Apologies for posting yet one more topic on the question of charset problems under Joomla 1.0, but I've been reading pretty much everything I found everywhere for many, many hours and still can't find a solution.
My website (http://www.internat-energy.com) used to work just fine since it was set up, 3 years ago. But then last week, I translated a few pages into English using Joomfish (which was already up and running); and suddenly, chaos: French accents and stuff start displaying in a weird way.(*)
EXCEPT... in 2 situations:
- when I use Firefox (3.6.12) on my Mac (Using Safari (5.0.3), for instance, diacritic characters are not displayed)
- if I switch to a different template (such as SolarFlare)
However, in Firefox, when characters are displayed correctly I can notice the "" signs on the top left corner of the page. The browser detects language iso-8859-1. If I switch text encoding to UTF8, the "" signs disappear, but so do all my diacritic characters. Same thing if I modify the text encoding within the French language file.
Question #1: from what I read, I'm guessing I uploaded files in a format that added the BOM. Weird. Could this have happened by copy-pasting translated text into JoomFish? (I'm using Coda for programming, pure html, and no editor in Joomla)
Right now, the charset embedded in my template's index.php is iso-8859-1, and the MySQL database tables are all in latin1_general_ci. (However, one strange thing: PhpMyAdmin tells me "Character set for MySQL: UTF8 Unicode". Is that something I should change? Using the following code, for instance: "ALTER DATABASE [db_name] CHARACTER SET 'latin1' ?")
My .htaccess file also contains the "AddDefaultCharset iso-8859-1" command.
Question #2: why on earth does everything work just fine when I switch templates, when the SolarFlare default template defines the character set in exactly the same way as my present template (ie, by pulling it out of the _ISO)??
Question #3: ...What should I do?
Cheers in advance!
Dorian
(*) I can't say for sure whether JoomFish has anything to do with the problem, but as far as I know, these few new translations are the only thing that happened to the site recently - no other major activity.
