Enable utf-8 support for vTiger crm

vTiger CRM team has announced that they had moved to utf-8 in the new 5.0.4 version of this open source CRM. But I had some issues in order to make it work correctly.

First of all, your database should be utf-8 compliant.

But this is not enough. If you try to import data from vTiger front-end via CSV import, you will get your data correct in the front-end, but not in the back-end :) If you look at the database, you will see that it was saved as unicode (I mean those cahracters which are from other than ISO-885-1 charset).

And even if you open your database via phpMyAdmin administration tool, and enter some new account naming it i.e. "Account Žopa", you will get "Account ?opa" from the front-end while listing Sales > Accounts.

In order to make it work correctly, you need to add the following line in the function connect in include/database/PearDatabase.php file.

$this->query("SET CHARACTER SET utf8");

This will help you to solve problems with utf-8.