special chars show as squares

[Ronaldve]

Hello,
I recently transfered moved a new server and since then special characters on some (not all) sites show up as squares (in IE).
I've ran dpkg-reconfigure locales an have ony insalled the en_us ISO-8859-1 locale only and set en_us as default and rebooted, but no change.

Any ideas? Thanks.

(debian etch, plesk 8.4, php 5)

 

[danliker]

i think, this is a html problem (charset)

 

[Ronaldve]

Ok, but on the old server everything was just fine.
The html files did not change.

I just realized this might have to do with MySQL. As far as I can see this is only an issue on pages that get their data from MySQL.
On the old server I was using MySQL 4.x, the new server has MySQL 5.x.
I used the Migration manager to transfer domains from the old server to the new server.

 

[danliker]

check the charset on the old and new mysql server, are they different ?

 

[Ronaldve]

old server:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character\_set\_%';
+--------------------------+--------+
| Variable_name            | Value  |
+--------------------------+--------+
| character_set_client     | latin1 |
| character_set_connection | latin1 |
| character_set_database   | latin1 |
| character_set_results    | latin1 |
| character_set_server     | latin1 |
| character_set_system     | utf8   |
+--------------------------+--------+

new server:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character\_set\_%';
+--------------------------+--------+
| Variable_name            | Value  |
+--------------------------+--------+
| character_set_client     | latin1 | 
| character_set_connection | latin1 | 
| character_set_database   | latin1 | 
| character_set_filesystem | binary | 
| character_set_results    | latin1 | 
| character_set_server     | latin1 | 
| character_set_system     | utf8   | 
+--------------------------+--------+

There are only a few domains with this problem.
I just compared one database on both servers but the collation settings for the tables and columns are the same (utf8_general_ci).

 

[Ronaldve]

I've enabled
#AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1
in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
this fixed the problem. (on the old server this line was disabled too)

Is this a good solution? Or is this likely to cause other problems?