No UTF-8 encoding after Upgrade to Joomla 3.3

[sonnenlanze]

Hi everybody,

I've upgraded a Joomla 2.5.x installation to 3.3 last week.
This is the original site: http://www.bruecklocherhof.de
This is the work status of the upgraded site: http://joomla3.bruecklocherhof.de

My issue is about the German "Umlaute". If I choose "English" as Frontend Language, all the special chars are shown correctly. I've installed the newest German language pack and if I choose that as default, all special chars in the content are scewed up. I've checked, the mySQL database uses UTF-8, the articles are shown just fine in phpmyadmin. I've tried to fix this by adding a default char set (UTF-8) in the .htaccess and I've tried to add a header (...) function in the head of my template. Nothing works.
If I switch back to english - the conent is fine. If I switch to german - the content get's screwed up.

Anyone any ideas how I could possibly fix this?
Thanks alot for any help or suggestions!
Kind regards,
Vanessa

[Slackervaara]

Did you prior the upgrade uninstalled the German Language pack? I tried to do that for a similar language and it did not work well, but if I kept the language pack and then upgraded to language pack 3.3 it went OK.

[sonnenlanze]

Hi Salckervaara,

No, I've kept the Language Pack. The default Language was reset to English nonetheless.
I don't really understand why the char set of the content changes when I switch to German?!

[sonnenlanze]

I've poked a bit around but still didn't find an answer
I've uninstalled the German languages for the frontend and for the backend.
Then I've checked in the file system and database if everything was removed. All was finde. I've again checked the database - it's still UTF-8 encoded. The Article and Menu entries look good in phpmyadmin (I can see all German "Umlaute").

While the Frontend was marked as "English", all Menu items and articles were also shown just fine - including all "Umlaute". Then I've re-installed the German Language and checked the de-DE.ini file on the server and it's also UTF-8 encoded.
Last, I've switched Frontend and Backend back to German -> All Articles and Menu entries are again wrong.

So what happens if I change the language in the Frontend to "German"? I had hope it could be a param in the extension-table but English has nothing set there. I'm not capable to determine where the difference comes from when switching from English to German.

[sonnenlanze]

No further ideas?
I can grant access if anyone takes up the challenge to find out why article texts get a different encoding when switching the language.

[Slackervaara]

I would test another webbrowser. Then I would look in the database where content is stored and look at encoding of the text and at caracter set for the text.

[sonnenlanze]

The error occurs in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome.
The text in the data base is stored as UTF-8.