Fix "Database Error" when posting topics in World and Local News

[JDC]

I always come to a "Database Error" screen whenever posting a new topic in World and Local News board, and it has been like this since the last topic I posted, which is from several weeks ago.

What is the cause of this, and how can it be fixed?

[Patton]

What most likely triggers this error are the special characters. SMF is stuck in 1998 when it comes to Unicode support and can accept only some of the characters from Unicode (like stars, hearts etc), but then chokes on the other characters (like the em dash). It brings up "Database Error" message because it has to filter out special characters before inserting them into the database and that is when it fails.

[Radagast]

But I've noticed this only on Argonath. All my forums are SMF, and I've never had such problems, writing in Spanish with accented characters, and using symbols...

[Reece]

The forum doesn't have UTF-8 enabled which causes the errors.

I also get it JDC when copying articles from certain news sites.

[JDC]

I've only had that problem on two recent articles, considering all the articles I've posted in World and Local news are from the same site: Yahoo! News.

[Reece]

If they have anything like a double hyphen, foreign currency symbol, specialised letter or such, the forum won't allow it.

[SugarD]

If they have anything like a double hyphen, foreign currency symbol, specialised letter or such, the forum won't allow it.

Correct.

Sometimes the alt-character version of the regular apostrophe, or the reverse symbol one, can also cause this issue. Many news sources commonly use the double hyphen that Reece is referencing in the beginning of their articles, as well.

[~Legend~]

Certainly can be a bit annoying at times.
You can install certain language packages in SMF to get over some of these issues, but one thing I've found when copy/pasting something is that after the disliked character, the rest of the text may be cut out while the portion before remains.

You could try posting in pieces if you cannot identify what's causing the problem.

[Aldo]

Ask Gandalf to convert the database to UTF-8 

SMF has a function built in to do this automatically!

[Gandalf]

Ask Gandalf to convert the database to UTF-8 

SMF has a function built in to do this automatically!

Which unfortunately is bugged.