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Joomla 1.5 and unicode databse

I have a server which (unfortunately) have tens of joomla 1.5 websites, After upgrade from Mysql to Mariadb 10 , all of the unicode texts are being displayed as question marks (i.e. ?????? ????), I looked into the databases , the data seems to be intact, even I moved some of them to another server with mariadb 5.6 which "seems" ok. It seems to be a driver/configuration issue.

It works on later versions of joomla (2.5& 3.x) versions. It seems mariadb should also be compatible with joomla 1.5 In the joomla system information it says: Database Version: 10.0.20-MariaDB Database Collation: N/A (mySQL < 4.1.2) PHP Version: 5.4.41 Web Server: Apache Web Server to PHP interface: cgi-fcgi Joomla! Version: Joomla! 1.5.26 Stable [ senu takaa ama busani ] 27-March-2012 18:00 GMT User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:39.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/39.0

Any help would be greatly appreciated , as I'm going to upgrade my other servers to mariadb.

Best

Answer Answered by Ali Jam in this comment.

I asked but no answers so I inspected and found the issue, I post here so if anyone needs to benefit the mariadb 10 for even older and non-supported versions can use this quick fix.

hope it helps

in libraries/joomla/database/database/mysql.php or (depending on your setting) ibraries/joomla/database/database/mysqli.php

comment the line 186

return ($verParts[0] == 5 || ($verParts[0] == 4 && $verParts[1] == 1 && (int)$verParts[2] >= 2));

and add this instead(assuming these days you'll have unicode supported database: return (1);

the code looks like:

  function hasUTF()
  {
  $verParts = explode( '.', $this->getVersion() );
  //return ($verParts[0] == 5 || ($verParts[0] == 4 && $verParts[1] == 1 && (int)$verParts[2] >= 2));
  return (1);
  }

Best

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