Hello.. My website URL is: rematv.org

To the top right there is a search... When JoomSEF is enabled, and I try to search a keyword that's in a different language, the search appears with weird characters like ?????? and not what I want.

For example I type into the search: видео and it will give me this: (Search results for "?????")

You see what I mean? It gives me those question marks if I search in another language..

And if I disable JoomSEF then everything is fine.. and it gives me the real letters (Search results for "видео") which is what I need, and NOT (Search results for "?????")

So JoomSEF is turned on right now. You can go on the site and feel free to search with a different language (Russian in my case)..

So if you can help.. I guess it's some problem with the encoding.. I have the latest version of JoomSEF and if I can get this problem fixed, I'll buy the paid version for sure to get rid of the credits..

PLEASE HELP!! I'm sure it's some bug because once I turn off JoomSEF everything works fine...
Anyone?

Hello,

Go to Manage SEF URLs and check the video/videos/displayresults/0/video link to see if there are the characters stored correctly. If they aren't, try checking or database encoding.

Best regards,
ARTIO Support Team

Hello, the characters appear as question marks there too.


They appear as questions mark in everything that's associated with JoomSEF.
Even if I set the custom page title in JoomSEF to something in a different language, it displays them as question marks.


So what should I do? How do I "check" or change the database encoding? to UTF or whatever it should be?

I have no clue in how to do that, so please help me and give me a walkthrough! After all, this isn't a Joomla installation problem but a JoomSEF related issue that occurs everytime and anywhere you install it!

Please help, will definitely purchase if I can get this solved! Thanks.

Hi,

Open any MySQL manager you have to access your database (usually phpMyAdmin), navigate to your Joomla database, open the jos_sefurls table, click the Operations tab and set collation to utf8_general_ci. If that helps, you can change the encoding also for other tables starting with jos_sef.
After this change you will probably need to delete the already created URLs using Manage SEF URLs page, so they can be recreated with the new encoding. And of course, backup your database before doing such changes.

Best regards,
ARTIO Support Team

One more thing - does your language in Joomla use utf-8 encoding? You can find out by right-clicking in your browser window and selecting View source. There must be the following line somewhere close to top of the page:

Yes my site does display <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> in the source code.

However,I updated anything that has to do with jos_sef to utf general (just like you said) and it doesn't work still.

I then purged the URLs, and recreated them, and the question marks still appear in search. :(