Fixing Errors When Displaying Special Characters in Older PHP Versions

For Shared Hosting packages

In the latest update of the Linux hosting platform, the default character set of the MySQL/MariaDB client was changed from Latin1 to UTF-8. This change to a more universal and modern character set promotes better support for a variety of languages and special characters. However, this can lead to problems with the display of umlauts and special characters in older applications that are still based on Latin1.

If your website is based on an older version of PHP and characters are displayed incorrectly after the update, you can fix the problem by forcing the use of Latin1. Depending on your PHP version, insert the following instruction into the PHP script of your website that establishes the connection to the database:

PHP 4 and PHP 4.4

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'latin1'",$connect);

PHP 5.2 and higher

When using the mysql extension:

mysql_set_charset('latin1',$connect);

When using the mysqli extension:

mysqli_set_charset('latin1',$connect);