My order no is 9412.

Not sure if I am in the right category (is this category for the users payed for JoomSEF component, or only for the users that have paid for the support service?). Please be kind as to relocate my thread if necessary.

### SYSTEM INFORMATION ###
JoomSEF version: JoomSEF 3.6.2.
Joomla version: Joomla! 1.5.15 Stable
Database Version: 5.1.45
PHP Version: 5.2.11
Database Collation: utf8_general_ci

### PROBLEM ###
Non-latin characters (Turkish and Russian characters) are not preserved in the fields of "Manage Meta Tags" tab. They are transformed into question marks (????) after I press "Save" or "Apply" buttons.
Also, these characers are preserved without the problem in "Metadata Information" tab of Joomla's default article manager.

### WHAT I HAVE TRIED ###

1. The database collation is utf8_general_ci. After the installation of JoomlaSEF I realized that the newly created tables have latin1 collation.

- I changed the collation of jos_sefexts, jos_sefexttexts, jos_sefmoved, jos_sefurls, jos_sefurlword_xref and jos_sefwords tables and their fields from latin1 to utf8_general_ci;
- Deleted the meta description fields with Turkish characters;
- Cleared the cache and entered the Turkish meta description text again

but it didn't solve the problem.

2. As I know I have no extensions installed that can make JoomSEF not to work properly.

3. "Enable MetaData generation" is set to "Yes" in the "Title and Meta Tags Configuration" tab.
Also, "Rewrite keywords", "Rewrite description" and "Prefer JoomSEF titles" are set to "Yes".

4. System - ARTIO JoomSEF plugin and System - SEF plugin are enabled.

### QUESTION ###

Why Turkish or Russian characters are not preserved in "Manage Meta Tags" tab of JoomSEF component?

Hello,

I've tested it with some random Russian characters and it works fine for me. Please, make sure that your admin section template uses UTF-8 encoding:
In your browser, right click on the page, select the View source code and somewhere on the top should be the line:

There must be utf-8 set as charset.

If your template uses the utf-8 character set, then please post the Russian and Turkish characters that are causing the problem.

Best regards,
ARTIO Support Team

david wrote:


Thank you or your suggestion, but I have no problem with encoding of admin template (it is utf-8).
All the Russian letters and some specific Turkish letters (like İ, ı, ş) were simply turning into the question marks after the page was saved. For example the word "Tanıtım" was saved as "Tan?t?m" and none of the Russian letters could be saved.

I uninstalled the JoomSef, resterod the database from the backup file and before installing the JoomSef again, I changed the encoding of the following files, located under the site/sef_ext to UTF-8 (they were encoded as iso-8859-1):
com_banner.xml
com_contact.xml
com_content.xml
com_mailto.xml
com_newsfeeds.xml
com_search.xml
com_user.xml
com_weblinks.xml
com_wrapper.xml
_com_example.xml

Not sure if it was the real problem, but everything is ok now.

thank you, your solution works for me.