· and ' locally changes to ? character online?

[Tijmen]

When I tested a website locally the text appeared just fine, with · in front of them or ' in the middle. But now that I have uploaded everything to a demo server the · and ' changed into ? Why does this happen, and what can I do to fix it?

This is what happens with text thats entered into the database

function safeEscapeString($string){

       global $dbc;
       if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
          $string = stripslashes($string);
        } 
     return mysql_real_escape_string($string, $dbc);    
     
}
  
function cleanVar($string){

      $string = trim($string);
      $string = safeEscapeString($string);
      $string = strip_tags($string);
      $string = preg_replace('/\s\s+/',' ', $string); //double spaties
      return $string;
      
} 

I thought maybe I should have used htmlspecialchars for the ·, but that doesn't have any effect.

[AutisticCuckoo]

Sounds like your web server is declaring a different character encoding (in the Content-Type HTTP header) than you used when editing your files.

[Tijmen]

Jup, server uses UTF-8 which I didn't use. But it doesn't seem to have any effect, I changed the files to UTF-8 now and nothing changed.

Using Live Headers in Firefox I get this

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

But a bit further up it also says this, which tell me both of them are supported?

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

[AutisticCuckoo]

Jup, server uses UTF-8 which I didn't use. But it doesn't seem to have any effect, I changed the files to UTF-8 now and nothing changed.

What do you mean by 'I changed the files to UTF-8'?
Did you re-save the files as UTF-8 and upload them to your server?

If you just changed your <meta> tag you haven't really changed anything. You need to save the files as UTF-8, or tweak the server to declare the encoding you actually did use.

By 'save the files as UTF-8' I mean that you must change the encoding setting in your editor to UTF-8 and then save the files again.

Using Live Headers in Firefox I get this

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

But a bit further up it also says this, which tell me both of them are supported?

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

That's Firefox telling the server which encodings it supports. It says that it prefers ISO-8859-1, but will accept UTF-8 if it has to and will try to take on anything else, too.

I doubt that you have any negotiation for character encoding on your site, so this header will most likely be ignored.