I was dealing with providers so many times that I'm sure if you could give me some temp. access to the place where this problem appears, I could be more fast and exact :)

Ok Paul. Will send details tomorrow.

Thanks

I have another server which is running the latest versions of php and everything else. I think I will install a forum on there and see if the problem occurs there as well. If the error occurs it might well enter something in the error logs that I can refer to.

Ok, try it out and let me know.

Too busy to set this server up Paul. I will send the login details to you, if you have the time to look at it that is. Which email address should I send the details to?

I seem to have fixed it. All I had to do was alter the charset in the language file to utf-8. A simple solution.

If you are moving your forums to UTF-8 mode, don't forget to take extra actions.

Actually, like I wrote initially, it's all about the base encoding set for the browser. I suppose you were using iso-8859-1 earlier. Some servers may not allow to bypass the chars from another encoding, and £ sign, as I remember, is not included in iso-8859-1, it's more up to iso-8859-2. You may try this as well.

The worst story about UTF-8 is that the database starts to take double size even if it's not needed at all. Also, searching functions are quite slower than in native encoding. That's why I always recommend my customers to use the native encoding.

Although I have cured the original problem another showed after. My admin html posts were not displaying the £ sign at all. I then used iso-8859-2 encoding and they reappeared but look a little odd. I have left the encoding as iso-8859-2 for now as the £ sign isn't causing any problems with posting.

Still the question remains as to why this should be occuring at all on the server. Obviously the version of html, php or even the database must be causing it. Would be handy to know what is happening. As I said earlier I had deprecating errors on my email program that I had to correct before it would work on the forum, so maybe something needs altering within minibb?

I'm actually not sure where and why do you catch this problem. As you see, on our forum we have iso-8859-1, and if you check the contents of this page, £ sign is not even transformed to an HTML entity.

Not sure on this as well. If you have used £ it should be displayed correctly almost everywhere.

I'm mostly sure it's about browser and how it deals with special chars in encoding table. It just "supplies" something to miniBB, which is not liked by it. You may debug the text you get step-by-step; something is definitely thrown out in textFilter function of bb_func_txt.php. As you see, it already has a lot of commented places to debug the input, so you may try to de-comment them and check at which stage the "emptying" of the string occurs.

Ok - thanks. I have setup a 2nd test server now which I updated to the latest version of ubuntu. I will install a clean version of minibb on it and go from there. I already have websites on it with minibb installed and they have the same encoding problem. Should be easier to sort out on my own server.

The cause of this appears to be the bb_func_txt.php file. My own is different from the latest version of minibb. I might well have altered it for some reason and copied over the original. Are there any plugins that require this file to be altered?

Odd. When I upload the unmolested bb_func_txt.php it solves the initial problem but now the £ sign refuses to work on the lastest news scripts.

This is a core file. None of the plugins requires to alter it.

You have to look into the lastest news scripts then... Worth trying with a default version as well.