I'm trying to deal with an old server that was resurrected after many years. The problem is that the DB is in a weird state.
The website reads the information from the DB with charset ="windows-1251". The the whole table and the fields in the table seen in phpMyAdmin have collation "cp-1251", which I think is the same as windows=1251. If the text is written in latin everything is displayed properly, but if I write the text in Bulgarian it won't work. Any ideas how to fix the DB issue? I have access to the phpMyAdmin & the admin panel of the website.
I was thinking to switch the charset & collation to utf-8 but I get "?" everywhere. Also I looked up similar websites and I saw that they were using charset = windows-1251 for the same fields, which makes me think that the data in the table is not right.
Either use MySQL's CHARACTER SET utf8 or cp1251.
You will need to switch to that charset throughout
set_charaset() in PHP)CHARACTER SET ...)For further discussion of the question marks, see Trouble with utf8 characters; what I see is not what I stored
In particular, the data was lost as you stored it into the table.