I just fixed another problem on my site that had the special character issues.
According to the client, the double-hyphen character that has been causing us trouble is called an Mdash. They enter these in the product descriptions as — which then shows up in the browser as the correct character.
The problem was that when they edit the product descriptions, the text in the edit box has a real Mdash instead of the code, and when they save this text the Mdash then shows up as a question mark in subsequent viewings of the product.
I created a test product to see this for myself, using Firefox on a Mac. I put the — in to my product description and saved it. On the overview page it looked fine (the — showed as it should), but when I clicked edit to edit the description, I saw the — displayed as an mdash. Then when I hit save, on the confirmation page it had already been turned into a question mark. That rules out the database as the culprit as nothing has been saved to it yet.
What finally fixed this, oddly enough, was setting URLCharset to iso-8859-1. I can't imagine why it made a difference - I'm not using query variables here, so unless the URLCharset also applies to forms, this seems rather odd. But anyway, I went ahead and set *all* the charset related options this time, like so:
ns_param HackContentType 1 ns_param DefaultCharset iso-8859-1 ns_param HttpOpenCharset iso-8859-1 ns_param OutputCharset iso-8859-1 ns_param URLCharset iso-8859-1
And they say things are working fine now. *phew*
janine
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