Problems with Pound (£) signs

[LHorton]

I’m having problems with Pound (£) signs not displaying correctly in the customer email. They do display on the catalog/checkout pages, so it’s only the plain text emails where there is a problem (See below).

Your Order (Prices in British Pounds)
 DESCRIPTION                     QUANTITY        PRICE         COST 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Drill, Dormer A100 HSS Jobber,          1        ý1.59        ý1.59 
 1.00mm                                                      
.
. 
.
.
.
.
.                                                      
.
 Drill, Dormer A100 HSS Jobber,          1        ý1.33        ý1.33 
 1.90mm 
======================================================================
                                             Subtotal:         ý2.92
                          Shipping (Standard Postage):         ý2.65
                                                  VAT:         ý0.84
                                                Total:         ý6.41

******************************************************

I’ve searched here and on the knowledge base but all other postings seem to be about the pound sign on the html pages not displaying.

I’ve tried .htaccess to put AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1 in the catalog and cgi-bin folders but this has no effect.

I could live with no £ symbol at all in the email, just the numbers, if anyone knows how to do that. (I do need to keep the £ sign on the web site though)

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks...
Lee

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

I have you made any changes to the perl scripts recently.

[Mike Hughes]

Is it just in the automatic customer emails or is there the same problem in the emails sent from your PC?

Mike

[LHorton]

Darren,

The only change I’ve made is to shoppingcart.pl as per this thread
http://community.actinic.com/showpos...6&postcount=12

Mike,

It seems to be any email originating from the website. i.e. checkout emails and messages from the ‘contact us’ form. Emails from my pc are OK. All other symbols display correctly, it just seems to be the £ sign.

Thanks for your help.

Lee

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Did you have a problem with the £ sign before making the script changes?

(The ý instead of a pound sign is to do with my email host I believe).

In the other thread you mentioned the possibility that the problem was related to our host, did you find out anymore.

[LHorton]

I think the £ sign was ok before and after the script change, though I wasn’t paying too much attention to these emails at the time.

I think the problem first appeared when we set up SSL for the site and move the site to a new server and upgraded to 9.0.3, all at the same time!

I haven’t made any progress at all with our hosting company. The guy there has been very willing to help, but so far has drawn a blank.

[LHorton]

Sorry. I started this thread in the wrong place. I should have posted in the v9 threads - should it be moved?

[LHorton]

I just found an old test order that confirms the £ sign was working after the perl script changes but before the move to the new server. If it’s a problem with the new server, any ideas as to what it might be? What might affect the plain text emails but not the html pages?

Cheers,

Lee

******************************************************
Order Number: LH79UR10000024
Order Date:   24 October 2008 18:41 GMT
.
.
.
Shopping Cart (Prices in British Pounds)
 DESCRIPTION                     QUANTITY        PRICE         COST 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Shellac Stick, Transparent             5        £4.05       £20.25 
 (Amber) 200mm                                                      

 Thixofix, contact adhesive             2        £2.58        £5.16 
 40ml Tube

[LHorton]

Any ideas anyone,

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Lee

[Mike Hughes]

Found on another fofrum and might be relevant:

I managed to solve my problem. Having moved to a dedicated server I hadn't got my appache config file sorted out correctly. I changed the following default configuration in appache and all is well - maybe someone else will have the same problem in the future:

In the appache httpd.conf file

#
# Specify a default charset for all content served; this enables
# interpretation of all content as UTF-8 by default. To use the
# default browser choice (ISO-8859-1), or to allow the META tags
# in HTML content to override this choice, comment out this
# directive:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8



I commented this out, reset my currency left symbol in localization, and all is working.

Mike

[LHorton]

Hi Mike,

Sorry for the late reply.

Thanks for the pointer – after some testing, the problem is clearly with the hosting and not Actinic. I have found that the problem exists if I include the pound symbol in a standard form from an old html page on the same server. This page uses iopost.pl form mail script.

After many emails to my hosting company, I have not managed to solve this problem – though I feel certain the problem is with the server setup.

I am on a shared server, so the apache conf file cannot be changed. They suggested changing/setting the character coding in the form mail script or to use .htaccess or try a different form mail script.

I’ve tried, in turn, each of the following: -

$charset = 'iso-8859-1'; - in iopost.pl

$charset = 'utf-8'; - in iopost.pl

AddDefaultCharset iso-8859-1 - in .htaccess

AddDefaultCharset utf-8 - in .htaccess

No effect was seen in the output of the forms, although changes in .htaccess did affect the rest of the site.

As the problem can be seen in the output from iopost.pl and the Actinc form mail script I don’t think the problem is in the Perl script.

As a temporary solution, I have changed the ‘Currency Settings’ to ‘Use GBP’ instead of ‘Use £ in Receipt Email’ under ‘Business Settings’ > ‘Options’.

At least this makes the email look ok – ie. with no errors.

I’m still working on this and will post any info here if I ever manage to get a solution.

Thanks for all your help.
Lee

[zgap111]

I once had problems with the pound signs (in the product description) changing to the same symbol as the ones on your image for your server-sent emails, and when I uploaded, the character changed to "?" question marks.

I believe it was due to the machine with Actinic had multiple languages installed (namely "Chinese" was installed on Vista)

I removed the language and reverted back to English only, and all displays "£" fine now...

Maybe the server you're on somehow has multiple languages installed?

[Lisa Carey]

Don't know if this thread is still active but we had a similar problem which was server-related. We couldn't change our server settings so I got around it by using unicode to specify pound sign in html ie. & # 163 ;

It seems to work in just about every situation