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We're on Civi 4.6.21 and Drupal 7.

We can't figure out why these characters - like  à and  - appear in our Event pages. The text is not on the page we created, obviously, right in Civi.

See the screenshots below - the first is this page in the Chromium browser on my laptop running Ubuntu.

Any clues appreciated!

UPDATE: The problem appears to be with the built-in version of CKEditor, see the second screenshot below. This code - Â - keeps getting re-inserted in to the page intro text source on Save after being edited out.

UPDATE 2: So - not sure why - and not a final fix - but editing the intro text source using Firefox, rather than Chrome, seems to take the weird characters out and not re-insert them on Save, pretty much. See the third screenshot below - the page after editing the source using Firefox, not Chrome.

UPDATE 3: Here's the CKEditor bug report from four years ago about this issue, it was fixed three years ago...maybe it's time to update the CKEditor version in CiviCRM 4.6.X? Is there a newer version of CKEditor in CiviCRM 4.7.X ?

Chromium on Ubuntu

CKEditor page

Firefox edited

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2 Answers 2

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Looks like you are using an older version of CiviCRM. If you upgrade to 4.7 then you will get the latest version of CKEditor.

Or you could help review this issue to get it updated in 4.6LTS. https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-packages/pull/166

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That type of thing is normally character encoding problems. The first thing I'd check is what the character encoding on your database tables are, e.g.

SHOW CREATE TABLE civicrm_event;

If it says charset=latin1 or anything instead of utf-8 at the bottom then I'd guess that's your problem. You can see here for ways to fix it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2150256/how-to-change-all-the-tables-in-my-database-to-utf8-character-set

Edit: To save anyone reading all the comments, in this particular case it has something to do with ckeditor and character encoding. Workaround is use a different browser like firefox.

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  • Demerit, thanks so much. Rather than trying to run mysql from the command line, will take a look at the tables and encoding using PHPMyAdmin.
    – Joe McLaughlin
    Sep 21, 2016 at 2:17
  • Commenting on your update, it sounds like you pasted from Word or something to create those pages, and there were bullets that are getting encoded incorrectly. If you create a similar page just by typing do you still get the problem?
    – Demerit
    Sep 21, 2016 at 2:57
  • Demerit - not positive but pretty sure the text was not created in Word but directly in CKEditor, will verify that - I wasn't the creator of the Event page. The extra "A" characters are not in the intro text source code in the civicrm_event table, which uses utf-8 encoding. See Update 2 above re using Firefox browser to edit the intro text source in Civi.
    – Joe McLaughlin
    Sep 21, 2016 at 3:30
  • Commenting on update 3: good sleuthing!
    – Demerit
    Sep 21, 2016 at 4:41
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    Demerit, this is on the CKEditor issue page: "Awesome, thank you for checking! It turned out that the issue was caused by missing UTF-8 BOM marker at the beginning of ckeditor.js. After fixing the online builder, I have recreated all packages available for download. So in order to get rid of this bug it should be enough to download the CKEditor package again (with correct BOM character in all JavaScript files). "
    – Joe McLaughlin
    Sep 21, 2016 at 6:09

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