Encoding issue in Artisteer (Joomla) footer menu

Server Config
1

Hello!

I switched hosting lately from Bluehost to Rochen (London).
I have this encoding problem in the footer menu of an Artisteer 3 template made for Joomla. It’s written in Cyrillic letters (Russian). And all I see is:

??? ?? ??? ??? ???

I had that template installed before in a different hosting environment (also Linux, Bluehost). But that menu worked fine!
What’s even stranger is that the main menu shows everything in Russian just fine! And in all other instances where russian letters appear (on buttons, etc.), it’s OK. And I can easily create russian articles in Joomla. No problems whatsoever with that.
And in index.php of the template it shows Cyrillic letters okay.
The db encoding is OK too (collation). It’s utf-8 general -ci or something like that.
Any ideas?
P.S. It’s the same in Mozilla FF, IE8 and Chrome. But I’m 200% certain it’s not on my end because I’ve been using Joomla Artisteer templates for years now and everything used to be OK. And I haven’t changed a thing in my browsers or Windows.

2

The problem is solved! All I did was opened index.php file of the current template in Notepad++ and then went to “Encoding” and chose “Encode in UTF-8 without BOM”. And then I went to “File”-“Save” and uploaded it back to the server.

3

abrodski,

:tup:

Thanks for giving your own response as I’m sure it would help others.

Moreso because I would have recommended a change to the httpd.conf (which you wouldn’t have had access to) or the php language direction (two strikes) before even considering changing the <html> encoding. While the server’s accepted languages would be specified by the first two, it’s the script’s encoding which manages this for you.

Regards,

DK