Hi
 
Just thought I'd post this on here in case anyone upgrades to PHP 5.4 and discovers a problem.
 
OUR ORIGINAL PROBLEM:
We were having a few problems with Viart 4.1 integrating with Paypal, this seems to have occurred since updating our server to PHP 5.4.
 
The item_name variable that we have populated with basket in the admin of our site used to pass information to Paypal fine prior to this update.
 
The other price & shipping information passes to paypal fine.
 
The problem in brief:
 
The description in Paypal is blank.
 
Paypal receives the following fine:
Invoice ID
Unit Price
Postage
 
CAUSE:
The move to PHP 5.4 requires the move to utf-8 charset. It's a requirement from PHP.
 
*******SOLUTION*******:
Viart are now working on it:
"In version 4.2 we will add a mechanism to automatically switch to utf-8 encoding after upgrade. The process includes changing existing messages in db to utf-8 and switching to utf-8 message pack (unzip utf-8 archive in /messages folder of ViArt Shop)."

there are a couple of 'simple' steps to convert your data in the database to utf-8
 
if you do a google search you should be able to come up with one
 
it will use the 'alter table' mysql command.
 
As always -- run the data migration on a test server/database and before live implementation backup the database,