Charset problems

[tbsmark86]

My config is set to utf8 as suggested; however suddenly all my old images had broken chars in titles while new images where valid.
Turns out that the default charset of my mariadb server changed due to configuration changes (Debian server use utf8mb4 as default instead of latin1)

So the Bug seems to be that the config-setting is never used in the actual database-connection. Of course the charset config is only available after connecting to the DB so this is a kind of chicken-egg problem.

I suggest two things:
a) in inc/config.inc.example add a line:
$CONFIG['dbcharset'] = 'utf8mb4'; // UTF8 suggested
b) In the admin.php add some Note that you should also change edit the config.inc.php

However after fixing this ... I now can't store Emoji and such in the DB because the table was created with the default collate (latin1 at that time). So to really fix this also the schema would need to specify the collate;
Seems to be complicated :/

So I'am now in encoding hell like explained in this article

[tbsmark86]

Another effect of the invalid collate is that searching for non-english characters is always case-sensitive.

For my DB i've manually fixed it for the relevant tables and fields with:

ALTER TABLE cpg_pictures CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET 'utf8mb4';
And the method suggested here