[CentOS] Strange apache problem

Mon Aug 5 14:07:31 UTC 2019
Gordon Messmer <gordon.messmer at gmail.com>

On 8/5/19 5:01 AM, Nikos Gatsis - Qbit wrote:
>>> On 8/2/2019 6:23 AM, Nikos Gatsis - Qbit wrote:
>>>> After update last centos packages, greek characters from sql request
>>>> look like question marks ?????
>> After hours of tryingΒ  to find out what happens, I found out that 
>> updated freetds and after httpd update cause this problem. I add 
>> client charset = ISO-8859-7 in freetds.conf and everything seems to 
>> work fine.
>> I'm not sure if this is right, because all pages are in UTF8. But 
>> adding this set to .conf dont work correct.
>> Is there someone familiar with freetds to explain me


I'm not familiar with freetds specifically, but the solution you 
describe suggests that while your pages are encoded in UTF-8, data from 
the SQL server was using a different encoding, and the server was mixing 
data in the two encodings into a single response to the client 
(browser).  Indicating the SQL server encoding in freetds.conf might 
have given httpd the information it needed to convert the SQL data into 
UTF-8, creating a coherent response to the client.

If you have time to investigate further, I'd suggest looking for a way 
to request UTF-8 from the SQL server (which might mean changing the 
setting in freetds.conf, or removing it and requesting UTF-8 
elsewhere).  Your current situation will work for Greek characters, but 
you'll be unable to save or view characters from other languages.