Character Sets

Representing characters outside US ASCII

A character set is a set of codes which represent a written language. For example, the latin1 character set can represent 256 unique characters, which is sufficient for written English.

As people began to Internationalize computer user interfaces, it was realized that larger character sets were required. The current standard character set (used by the current version of Zen Cart) is called UTF8MB4.

When you try to display a character using a character set that cannot represent it, often the result will look like this:

�

Seeing this symbol indicates that you may not be using UTF8MB4 throughout your cart. Things to check are:

  • The DB_CHARSET value in your configure.php file. This setting is the encoding between your database and the output of pages on your site.
  • The CHARSET value in your language files in includes/languages/YOURTEMPLATE/. For example, if your template is bootstrap and your store uses English and French, check both includes/languages/bootstrap/english.php and includes/languages/bootstrap/french.php. This setting controls the <meta charset="YOURENCODING"> tag at the top of your web pages.
  • Your database tables. If you have not yet gone through the process of converting from iso-8859-1 to utf8, you may need to.

You may also need to check:

  • The $locales value in your language files in includes/languages/YOURTEMPLATE/.


Still have questions? Use the Search box in the upper right, or try the full list of FAQs. If you can't find it there, head over to the Zen Cart support forum and ask there in the appropriate subforum. In your post, please include your Zen Cart and PHP versions, and a link to your site.

Is there an error or omission on this page? Please post to General Questions on the support forum. Or, if you'd like to open a pull request, just review the guidelines and get started. You can even PR right here.
Last modified December 10, 2021 by Scott C Wilson (26c5ba44).