Joomla: Special characters in extension

Question

We are developing a calendar extension for Joomla, which consists of a component and module. While all characters display perfectly in the module, some special characters in a component are causing problems. For example, the component doesn't display characters Š (instead it displays Š ) and " (instead it displays &" ). Do you have any idea, what could be the problem? Probably it must be something quite small and obvious, but we are at to moment so into the thing, that we have obviously overlooked something.

Thanks in advance for your ideas!

Answer 1

What is the collation of your database ? Setting the database collation to UTF-8 might work for you This can be done easily in phpmyadmin or excuting the query

ALTER DATABASE <database_name> CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

Answer 2

I used to had problems with my characters when I do consults to the DB, so for show this characters I use this command:

utf8_decode()

Hope you can use it.