MBSTRING not found and question marks

[plofhead]

Hi,

I just migrated my site to another server. In my entries I see suddenly a lot of question marks appearing i.s.o. spaces.
When I open my MySQL database I see the following error:

The mbstring PHP extension was not found and you seem to be using a multibyte charset. Without the mbstring extension phpMyAdmin is unable to split strings correctly and it may result in unexpected results.

Can this have something to do with the unwanted question marks? And how do I solve this?

Regards,
Bert

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Different MySQL versions handle different charsets differently.

So it might be you did the import wrong, and imported a different charset into a database with another charset.

This can get all very, very complicated if the servers you migrated from and to differ in that aspect. In that case, it's hard to give general instructions.

So, what I need are more details:

1. Do you run serendipity in "Native" or "UTF-8" charset?
2. Which MySQL version did you run previously, which one do you run now?
3. Which charset is your MySQL-server running now, which one did it run previously?
4. The SQL dump you made, in which charset did you save it, and in which charset did you upload it?

If you have a friend that's familiar with charsets, now is the time to ask him for help, or to get someone other bribed to do the nasty job of charset conversion for you.

Best regards,
Garvin