Dean's World

Tech Bleg

J.A. Eddy

I've got an irritating problem- I moved 3500years.com to a new host, and now all the old posts have question marks (???) where there were quotation marks, apostrophes and ellipsis's.

I'm running MT 3.17 and I tried adjusting the character encoding in the mt config file, but no luck. What I've finally done is export my entries, paste it into notepad, then I used find/replace to swap curly quotes and apostrophes with straight ones and ellipsis's with three periods.

Now... do I have to delete all posts and comments, then re-import the adjusted file? Am I missing something? Anyone? Bueller?

And before anyone suggests it- I'm not interested in upgrading to a newer version.

Posted by J.A. Eddy | Permalink | Technorati Trackbacks

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Dean Esmay:

I wish I knew what to do but I don't. I'm not, despite my reputation, a Movable Type wiz. I know how to set up a basic MT blog correctly. That's about it.

Maybe Tyrone or someone else can help advise us?

6.28.2007 8:40pm

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Brian Tiemann (mail) (www):

This occurs when the database contents were exported from the old host using a different character encoding set than what was used to create the new database on the new host.

What process did you use to dump the database contents? If it's MySQL, try using "default-character-set=latin1" in the mysqldump command line, and then ensure that it's latin1 that the database on the new host is created in. (Use similar options for other databases; I'm not sure what those would be offhand.)

6.28.2007 9:51pm

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Ronald Coleman (mail) (www):

Yeah, I was going to say what Brian said. You try that.

6.28.2007 11:04pm

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Jay Solo (mail) (www):

People still use MT? Wow!

:>

6.28.2007 11:34pm

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John Eddy (mail) (www):

Brian-

Nothing so fancy- I did a text export using the menu Import/Export function.

My question is this- before I import the 'fixed' file, should I delete all of the old entries?

The old database is gone- my old host's server was flaking out and we did an emergency move.

6.29.2007 8:24am

Commenting on Dean's World is a privilege, not a right. Dean is your host, you are his guest, and you should behave in that fashion. Dean is not your babysitter, nor is he your punching bag. Please remember this. In general, you are free to disagree with anyone on any subject you wish, but abusive behavior will not be tolerated.

Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.

Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.