Suitecrm: Scandinavian characters displayed as ? in iCalendar sync file

[timo12357]

Issue

Scandinavian letters ÅåÄäÖö are presented as "??????" in file ical_server.php generated by SuiteCRM iCal sync.

Expected Behavior

ÅåÄäÖö should show as ÅåÄäÖö

Actual Behavior

ÅåÄäÖö is presented as ?????? in both the synced calendar and sync file ical_server.php provided by SuiteCRM

Possible Fix

Steps to Reproduce

1. Copy iCal synchronisation URL to your local calendar and subscribe to it
2. Create a calendar entry in SuiteCRM with scandinavian letters ÅåÄäÖö in the title and content
3. Sync calendars and/or download sync file from iCal syncronisation URL
4. ÅåÄäÖö has become ??????

Context

This is a disturbing element and may render calendar entries useless.

Your Environment

• SuiteCRM Version used: 7.8.8 LTS
• Browser name and version: Firefox 56.0 64 bit
• Environment name and version (e.g. MySQL, PHP 7): Ubuntu 16.04
• Operating System and version (e.g Ubuntu 16.04): Ubuntu 16.04

[horus68]

What language pack (and SuiteCRM version) are you using?
Also please see this unmerged PR (24 Mar 2016)

• Fix iCal problem with Cyrilic charset https://github.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM/pull/1163

Note for others:
Collecting more details by user timo12357 from the forum topic and from a now closed issue

My Mysql database is utf4mb8, my collation is utf8mb4_unicode_ci and I have also tried to sync without the &encoding=iso-8859-15.
Checked both apache2.conf and php.ini and the default charset in both is set to utf8.

Using the encoding direction in the address:
http://myip/SuiteCRM/ical_server.php?type=ics&key=somekey&[email protected]&encoding=iso-8859-1
Info: https://developer.sugarcrm.com/2012/05/29/new-in-sugar-6-5-ical-support-for-calendar/

Same if removing the encoding parameter in the url, eg
http://myip/SuiteCRM/ical_server.php?type=ics&key=somekey&[email protected]

[Dillon-Brown]

@timo12357 Is this a duplicate of #252?. If you are able to give #1163 a try, let us know if it resolves your issue. Thanks.

[timo12357]

Neither #1163 nor #252 unfortunately did fix the problem.-
I am using no language packs, only english UI.
Has this problem been reported by anybody else?

[timo12357]

Did some further research on this: I installed a backuped 7.8.5 to the same environment where our 7.8.8 is installed. I replaced the 7.8.5 config.php with the config.php from the 7.8.8. The system is now using the same MySQL database and is located in the same environment.
7.8.5 works OK, 7.8.8 replaces Scandinavian letters with "?".

[Dillon-Brown]

Most likely that the issue has been caused by this fix #4423

[artjomsmorscakovs]

I think I found the solution
It is not caused by this fix #4423
File "modules/Calendar/Calendar.php" doesn't have Charset set or it is set wrong
To fix this, open "modules/Calendar/Calendar.php" with Notepad++ and set encoding to UTF-8
At least this helped for me

[timo12357]

How do I set encoding to UTF-8 in Calendar.php?
I added

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

But this made no change. Using 7.8.18
Sorry, I do not write or read PHP very well..

[timo12357]

I solved this with an uggly workaround:
Installed a parallell install with version 7.8.5 on the same server.
Linked config.php and config_override.php in the 7.8.5 to those in the current 7.8.18.
Now I adress my calendar to the 7.8.5 version and Scandinavian letters are working fine.
For CRM use I use the latest version.

Uggly but works.

[artjomsmorscakovs]

I mean, download calendar.php file on local sistem, the you open calendar.php in notepad++ the press Encoding -> Encode in UTF-8 -> save -> override file on the server

[timo12357]

Unfortunately converting /modules/calendar/Calendar.php to utf-8 made no difference.

[mwalbeck]

As noted in the comments of #1163 removing utf8_decode from the return statement will fix this problem. Is there any reason why this can't be removed?