Product Description Disappears After Editing

[labmais]

I have two stores ("A" and "B"), being B a copy of A.

Both stores are stored in two different servers.

 

osCommerce version

// define the project version

  define('PROJECT_VERSION', 'osCommerce 2.2-MS2');

 

PROBLEM

Editing any product makes the description disappears.

The problem seems to be related to special characters (á,à, ä, â, ã, é, ê, ç, · etc.).

Character collation of DB is: "latin1_swedisch_ci"

 

 

PRE-EDITING:

 

 

DURING EDITING:

 

EDITING SOMETHING:

 

PREVIEW EDITIONS:

 

AFTER EDITING:

[labmais]

I have changed PHP version to 5.3 and website operates normally.

What setting may be responsible for this behaviour?

Since it works on 5.3 and not on 5.5, then changing some setting may solve the issue.

 

 

On PHP 5.5 doesn't work

On PHP 5.3 works

[allaboutwicker]

Hi Rafael,

 

Unfortunately, the version of oscommerce you are using is quite old and outdated which is now going to start to have some serious issues. I would highly recommend to upgrade website to the newest 2.3.4 version or better yet 2.3.4 BS before it totally fails you.

[labmais]

Hi Rafael,

 

Unfortunately, the version of oscommerce you are using is quite old and outdated which is now going to start to have some serious issues. I would highly recommend to upgrade website to the newest 2.3.4 version or better yet 2.3.4 BS before it totally fails you.

Hey, Leslie, that's not something that can be done.

I'm studying a new shop for the future, but now I need to solve this issue only.

 

What are the relevant PHP settings that have to do with the mentioned problem?

[MrPhil]

I seem to recall that around PHP 5.4, PHP switched to defaulting to UTF-8 in its character handling (at least for some functions). As osC 2.2-MS2 was originally written for Latin-1 character encoding, all sorts of things could have gone wrong. Are you sure that everything is UTF-8 all the way through? Database (including all existing text), text functions, output pages? Actually, considering how ancient MS2 is, I'm a bit surprised that it works on 5.3 -- you must have already updated the PHP code to some extent. You're definitely going to be running into more and more PHP-related problems as you upgrade PHP versions, so you must either be prepared to do a lot of debugging, or move up to a current osC version.

[labmais]

SOLVED

Problem was the PHP setting "internal_encoding".

Changing it from "no value" (empty), to "ISO-8859-1" fixed the problem. Products edition is working properly.

 

I don't know when "internal_encoding" was introduced. From PHP manual I can only see it seems to be deprecated as of 5.6.

On my host, anyway, since PHP 5.4, this problem appeared.

 

 

PROBLEM

While editing a product, if any special character (é, á, ç, ü etc.) was used, the whole field (name, description etc.) would be emptied after updating changes.

CAUSE

PHP setting "internal_encoding" was not set.
Had to set it to "ISO-8859-1".
*This solution was specific for my store, an outdated osCommerce version (2.2).
**Changing "default_charset" to "UTF-8" would fix this issue, but would bring new ones.

 

SOLUTION

Add the following line to php.ini

internal_encoding = iso-8859-1;