UK Pound Question Mark – HUH?

Changing host is a simple thing – I’m not going to go into great detail about where to find a host, name server changes or any of that.

I have found that moving an osCommerce site can sometimes be problematic – not least because of database issues and the sheer number of files that osCommerce contains. If you have 1000 products, that’s an extra 1000 (or more likely 2000) images to move as well!

Every time that I have moved an osCommerce store recently, I’ve found that the UK pound sign is replaced by a question mark in the database. This means that all prices show for example ?45.99 instead of £45.99 – also any and all orders that were paid for in pounds, now show the problem question mark instead 🙁

I’ve hunted Google and see lots of this problem – it appears to be MySQL related. No matter, it’s easy to fix in osCommerce (let’s assume you have your database/store up and running on the new host and you now need to fix those pesky £ ? errors)…

Step 1: Fixing the Shop Prices

Go to your Admin Area and then Localization > Currencies. Select UK Pounds and press edit. Change the ? to a £ and press update.

Step 2: Fixing all the existing orders

Hopefully you have PHPMyAdmin as part of your hosting package, it comes as standard with cPanel and Plesk. Run this SQL Command:

UPDATE `orders_total` SET `text` = REPLACE(`text`, "?", "£");

That’s all there is too it. Your shop is now fixed 😀