[ic] Extended ASCII problem - non-English characters

[ICdev]

Excuse me for the duplicate, just re-sending using another 8-bit char 
set, just in case.


Hello,

I have a problem with extended ASCII characters being displayed
incorrectly in various places within Interchange. For example, foreign
addresses with non-English characters (German, Swedish and so on)
substitute 'gibberish' characters for the correct ones, so we have to
contact the customer to get them to re-send their address by e-mail. :-(

The gibberish characters are stored in the database (MySQL), and are
sent in the e-mail receipts/reports. The characters are also displayed
incorrectly in the Admin interface.

Examples (may not turn out right on some systems!):

MySQL, orders/, e-mail: Nürnberg
Admin: Nürnberg

MySQL: VäSTERGöTLAND
orders/, e-mail: västergötland
Admin: VäSTERGöTLAND

Occasionally, the foreign characters are stored correctly, and sent in
e-mails correctly, but are still not displayed properly in Admin:

MySQL, orders/, e-mail: Störåsen (correct)
Admin: Störåsen

To confuse things further, the e-mail report received sometimes varies
from the report in the 'orders' directory, and from what is in the
database. For example, in the e-mail, there may be two gibberish
characters, one directly after the other on an address line, yet the
corresponding file in orders/ only has one character in that same place:

MySQL, orders/ : HaÃfurter (variation 1)
e-mail: Haßfurter (variation 2)
Admin: Haßfurter (variation 3)

There is also a problem with the British pound symbol (£) in order
report e-mails. The e-mail received from etc/mail_receipt is fine, but
the one from etc/report prepends weird 'A' characters to the pound
symbol. Again, this varies from what is in the orders directory. In the
e-mail, there are two weird 'A's separated by a comma before the pound
symbol for item prices:

Ã,£0.00

...but in the corresponding orders/ file, there is no comma. The
'Subtotal', 'Sales Tax', 'Shipping', 'Order Total' lines, etc. also have
one weird 'A' character prepended to the pound symbol:

£0.00

I take it this is happening because the last 128 characters of 8-bit
ASCII vary between computers and operating systems (and even between
software on the same machine). Has anyone else experienced this problem,
and does anyone have any idea how to fix it?

Running IC 4.8.7 on RedHat 7.3.

Thanks in advance for any help.