Help with old phpbb db

[Dakis]

I have this very old phpbb database, for a forum I used to run for 10 friends to keep in touch years ago. I want to bring it back now, but:

The problem is this database is in a funny collation (maybe latin with greek iso-8859-7 encoding?) and I can't even display the characters properly when I restore it to a phpbb installation now. Obviously the forum was in greek.

Is there anyone with knowledge around foreign encoding problems that can help me bring this thing back to life?

 

[Arty]

Try updating it to latest phpBB 3.1 first, then import to XenForo. I think 3.1 update might fix encoding issue.

 

[Dakis]

Thanks Arty, I tried that but didn't change the encoding. Basically it just carries on the same funny characters. Maybe I need to do some database conversion or something?

 

[Jake Bunce]

Look for a setting to specify the charset of the page. This is usually defined in the language or style. In the page source you will see it as a meta tag in the head of the page:

<meta charset="utf-8" />

 

[Dakis]

Thanks Jake, I should've mentioned I've done all that and I still get nothing. The actual characters in the database are looking bad.

If I want to get someone to help me, what's the best way to do this? Load it up on a server somewhere? (I have it on my local xampp now)

 

[Fred.]

Does your DB charset (You can check that in phpmyadmin or something) show the same charset then in the source code?
Which charset does it show? It's probably not utf-8 but a specific greek charset. You need to have the right charset in both places otherwise you get weird signs.
So you have to start with the same charset then your DB.

 

[Dakis]

Yeah the problem is phpbb didn't support greek characters back then so my database collation was latin something, so even the values in my database tables are funny characters that only "translated" to the proper greek characters on the forum with the use of some sort of charset encoding in the phpbb config. But I can't seem to get that combination right after all these years

 

[Fred.]

Oh, ok. So you messed it up a long time ago.
You can go on https://archive.org and check the source code for the charset you used back then on your old forum.

 

[Dakis]

Hahaha yes I did

Yeah I've done that and the charset is what I expected it to be: charset=iso-8859-7

Hmmm I might have to scrap the whole thing and start from scratch, see how I go. I've messed up this db now more times than I can count.