This question already has answers here:
UTF-8 all the way through
(13 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
I've done a very few web PHP/MySQL based web projects, and sooner or later, I always have charset issues.
I live in Spain, and we have some special characters over here: ç ñ á é í ó and ú
There are so many variables, that the charset always gets messed up:
MySQL database collation
PHP/HTML headers
Web browser codification settings
PHP settings
Apache settings
What I would like to have is a basic guideline on how to setup everything, so that I don't have issues with these Spanish characters.
There are three types of ways I populate my HTML output:
I query the MySQL database with PHP, and echo the output.
I write some words directly with HTML, for example
<p>Qué rábanos pasaría mañana</p>
I read a labels.ini file with parse_ini_file($file); The label file looks something like:
SORTING_ENTITY = Línea de negocio
SORTING_PLURAL = Líneas de negocio
MAIN_ENTITY = Instalación
MAIN_PLURAL = Instalaciones
So when I view the website, sometimes the texts generated from MySQL are messed up, other times the direct HTML is messed up, and other times everything is okay, but the content coming from the .ini file is messed up.
Also sometimes, I use web forms, so that the users input data that is saved in MySQL. The users write for example "Pájaro" in the web form, and some incorrect chars are stored in the database like "P}jaros" or something like that.
I would like to have some guidelines, so that everything is setup in a way that whatever I write in direct HTML or .ini file is shown in the website, and whatever the users writes in the web form is stored correctly, and also displayed in the same way when later reading this data and echoing with PHP.
I don't want to be using stuff like:
á
ñ
echo utf8_encode($dat);
In HTML head element always include
<meta charset="UTF-8"/>
To output UTF-8 charecters in PHP
header("Content-type: 'text/html'; Charset='UTF-8');
Also, remember to put headers on top of every PHP script
For PHP CRUD(Create, Read, Update, Delete) use this code
$conObj = new mysqli("", "", "", "");
$conObj->query("SET character_set_results = 'utf8', character_set_client = 'utf8', character_set_connection = 'utf8', character_set_database = 'utf8', character_set_server = 'utf8'");
Try to create a class with this "query" function (call it encoder or anything you like), so whenever you make an object of this class, this function will be automatically executed and you will not have to hard code it and write under every connection instance/object.
Related
This question already has answers here:
UTF-8 all the way through
(13 answers)
Closed 9 years ago.
I have my page encoding set to utf8 and even in the meta tag as utf8.
However, when i'm taking a value from a database it's putting a diamond with a question mark instead - im assuming doesnt know the character.
The character is a é. If i do a echo é; it displays as normal on the page. Also if i write it manually in html. However, when i grab the same value from a database call using PDO i get a �
I'm assuming its a PDO setting. I've tried:
$db->exec("SET NAMES 'utf8';");
but this doesnt resolve it.
Any suggestions?
Many things can go wrong on the way. Usually you need to have your source file encoded using utf-8, and opening the database connection using utf-8 and defining the database tables as utf-8.
A great article from #deceze that helped me clarify things is http://kunststube.net/frontback/.
The most obvious things you can try in your case are:
Save you source file with utf8 encoding. This option exists in editors like Notepad++ or Crimpson Editor.
create the PDO connection with utf8 option:
$connection = new PDO('mysql:host='.$this->host.';dbname='.$this->db_name.';charset=utf8', $this->user, $this->pass,array(PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES => false, PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE => PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION));
make sure your table is utf-8 encoded and your form has the option :
< form action="action.php" accept-charset="utf-8">
Update: maybe utf8_encode fixed your problem, but there is a wrong conversion somewhere from the PHP to the database and back. or an wrong file encoding. You should fix the root of the problem, and utf8_encode will not be needed anymore.
I'm working with UTF-8 encoding in PHP and I keep managing to get the output just as I want it. And then without anything happening with the code, the output all of a sudden changes.
Previously I was getting hebrew output. Now I'm getting "&&&&&".
Any ideas what might be causing this?
These are most common problems:
Your editor that you’re creating the PHP/HTML files in
The web browser you are viewing your site through
Your PHP web application running on the web server
The MySQL database
Anywhere else external you’re reading/writing data from (memcached, APIs, RSS feeds, etc)
And few things you can try:
Configuring your editor
Ensure that your text editor, IDE or whatever you’re writing the PHP code in saves your files in UTF-8 format. Your FTP client, scp, SFTP client doesn’t need any special UTF-8 setting.
Making sure that web browsers know to use UTF-8
To make sure your users’ browsers all know to read/write all data as UTF-8 you can set this in two places.
The content-type tag
Ensure the content-type META header specifies UTF-8 as the character set like this:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
The HTTP response headers
Make sure that the Content-Type response header also specifies UTF-8 as the character-set like this:
ini_set('default_charset', 'utf-8')
Configuring the MySQL Connection
Now you know that all of the data you’re receiving from the users is in UTF-8 format we need to configure the client connection between the PHP and the MySQL database.
There’s a generic way of doing by simply executing the MySQL query:
SET NAMES utf8;
…and depending on which client/driver you’re using there are helper functions to do this more easily instead:
With the built in mysql functions
mysql_set_charset('utf8', $link);
With MySQLi
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8")
*With PDO_MySQL (as you connect)*
$pdo = new PDO(
'mysql:host=hostname;dbname=defaultDbName',
'username',
'password',
array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8")
);
The MySQL Database
We’re pretty much there now, you just need to make sure that MySQL knows to store the data in your tables as UTF-8. You can check their encoding by looking at the Collation value in the output of SHOW TABLE STATUS (in phpmyadmin this is shown in the list of tables).
If your tables are not already in UTF-8 (it’s likely they’re in latin1) then you’ll need to convert them by running the following command for each table:
ALTER TABLE myTable CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
One last thing to watch out for
With all of these steps complete now your application should be free of any character set problems.
There is one thing to watch out for, most of the PHP string functions are not unicode aware so for example if you run strlen() against a multi-byte character it’ll return the number of bytes in the input, not the number of characters. You can work round this by using the Multibyte String PHP extension though it’s not that common for these byte/character issues to cause problems.
Taken form here: http://webmonkeyuk.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/how-to-avoid-character-encoding-problems-in-php/
Try after setting the content type with header like this
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
Try this function - >
$html = "Bla Bla Bla...";
$html = mb_convert_encoding($html, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8");
for more - http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-convert-encoding.php
I put together this method and called it in the file I'm working with, and that seemed to resolve the issue.
function setutf_8()
{
header('content-type: text/html; charset: utf-8');
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_http_output('UTF-8');
mb_http_input('UTF-8');
mb_language('uni');
mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');
ob_start('mb_output_handler');
}
Thank you for all your help! :)
I have come across some problems when inputting certain characters into my mysql database using php. What I am doing is submitting user inputted text to a database. I cannot figure out what I need to change to allow any kind of character to be put into the database and printed back out through php as it's suppose to.
My MySQL collation is: latin1_swedish_ci
Just before I send the text to the database from my form I use mysql_real_escape_string() on the data.
Example below
this text:
�People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.�
� Abraham Lincoln
is suppose to look like this:
“People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
― Abraham Lincoln
As mentioned by others, you need to convert to UTF8 from end to end if you want to support "special" characters. This means your web page, PHP, mysql connection and mysql table. The web page is fairly simple, just use the meta tag for UTF8. Ideally your headers would say UTF8 also.
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Set your PHP to use UTF8. Things would probably work anyway, but it's a good measure to do this:
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_http_output('UTF-8');
mb_http_input('UTF-8');
For mysql, you want to convert your table to UTF8, no need to export/import.
ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8
You can, and should, configure mysql to default utf8. But you can also run the query:
SET NAMES UTF8
as the first query after establishing a connection and that will "convert" your database connection to UTF8.
That should solve all your character display problems.
The likeliest cause of the problem is that the database connection is set to latin1 but you are feeding it text encoded in UTF-8. The simplest way to solve this is to convert your input into what the client expects:
$quote = iconv("UTF-8", "WINDOWS-1252//TRANSLIT", $quote);
(What MySQL calls latin1 is windows-1252 in the rest of the world.) Note that many characters, such as the quotation dash U+2015 that you use there, cannot be represented in this encoding and will be converted into something else. Ideally you should change the column encoding to utf8.
An alternative solution: set the database connection to utf8. It doesn't matter how the columns are encoded: MySQL internally converts text from the connection encoding into the storage encoding, you can keep the columns as latin1 if you want to. (If you do, the quotation dash U+2015 will be turned into a question mark ? because it's not in latin1)
How to set the connection encoding depends on what library you are using: if you use the deprecated MySQL library it's mysql_set_charset, if MySQLi it's mysqli_set_charset, if PDO add encoding=utf8 to the DSN.
If you do this you'll have set the page encoding to UTF-8 with the Content-Type header.
Otherwise you would be having the same problem with the browser: feeding it text encoded in UTF-8 when it's expecting something else:
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
The solutions provided are helpful if starting from scratch. Putting all possible connections to UTF-8 is indeed the safest. UTF-8 is the most used charset on the net for a variety of reasons.
Some suggestions and a word of warning:
copy the tables you want to sanitize with a unique prefix (tmp_)
although your db-connection is forced to utf8, check you General Settings collation, change to utf8_bin if that was not done yet
you need to run this on the local server
the funny char error is mostly due to mixing LATIN1 with UTF-8 configurations. This solution is designed for this. It could work with other used char-sets that LATIN1 but I haven't checked this
check these tmp_tables extensively before copying back to the original
Builds the 2 array needed for the magic:
$chars = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
$LATIN1 = $UTF8 = array();
while (list($key,$val) = each ($chars)) {
$UTF8[] = $key;
$LATIN1[] = $val;
}
Now build up the routines you need: (tables->)rows->fields and at each field call
$row[$field] = mysql_real_escape_string(str_replace($LATIN1 , $UTF8 , $row[$field]));
$q[] = "$field = '{$row[$field]}'";
Finally build up and send the query:
mysql_query("UPDATE $table SET " . implode(" , " , $q) . " WHERE id = '{$row['id']}' LIMIT 1");
change the MySQL collation to utf8_unicode_ci or utf8_general_ci, including the table and the database.
You will need to set your database in utf-8 yes. There is many ways to do it. By changin the config file, via phpmyadmin or by calling php function (sorry memory blank) right before insert and update the mysql.
Unfortunately, i think you will have to re-enter any data you entered before.
One thing you also need to know, from personnal experience, make sure all table with relation have the same collation or you won'T be able to JOIN them.
as reference: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/charset-syntax.html
Also, i can be a apache setting. We've experienced the same issue on 'free-hosting' server as well as on my brother's server. Once switched to another server, all the charater's became neat. Verfiy you apache setting, sorry but i can't bting more light on apache's config.
Get rid of everything you just need to follow these two points, every problem regarding special languages characters will be resolved.
1- You need to define the collation of your table to be utf8_general_ci.
2- define <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> in the HTML after head tag.
2- You need to define the mysql_set_charset('utf8',$link_identifier); in the file where you made connection with the database and right after the selection of database like 'mysql_select_db' use this 'mysql_set_charset' this will allow you to add and retrieve data properly in what ever the language it is.
If your text has been encoded and decoded with the wrong encoding and so the mojibake is actually "solidified" into unicode characters, then the solutions mentioned so far won't work. I ended up having success with the ftfy Python package to automatically detect/fix mojibake:
https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy
https://pypi.org/project/ftfy/
https://ftfy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
>>> import ftfy
>>> print(ftfy.fix_encoding("(ง'⌣')ง"))
(ง'⌣')ง
Hopefully this helps people who are in a similar situation.
I have a bit of PHP that gets data from a MSSQL database and saves it to an array:
while($row = mssql_fetch_array($dbquery, MSSQL_NUM))
{
$content = array(
'something' => $row[1],
'something_else' => $row[2]
// etcetera
);
}
(The reason why I write the data to an array like that is not relevant I think, but if you must know: it is because the data is parsed by ExpressionEngine (EECMS). The PHP code is part of a plugin I am developing and this is the easiest way to make the data available for use in ExpressionEngine tags.)
Some of the data in de MSSQL database contains punctuated characters, such as ë and é. The diaeresis (ë) are shown as question marks in the HTML. For instance, Cliënten is shown as Cli�nten.
The HTML is in UTF8: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
I cannot change anything in the MSSQL database. What is the best way, preferably in PHP, to fix this?
When you see question marks like that, it means your browser is having trouble understanding what the character the question mark has replaced is supposed to represent. Most likely, it is expecting utf8 character encodings and is not getting them.
Try running something like this on your array (after it's built) and see if that helps:
$content = array_map('utf8_encode', $content);
Basically you want to run the utf8_encode() function on all the strings that come out of the database since apparently they are not encoded as such in the database.
You could also run the utf8_encode function immediately before you output each variable.
So something like:
<p><?php echo utf8_encode($content_row) ?></p>
I am facing an small issue in my project When I am trying to store some German words into the MYSQL Database. When this German words contains umlauts i.e. characters ä, ö, ß, ü etc., they are not stored as they are.....?
I want to store them as it is into the Database.To do so I tried to change the COLLATION to UTF8-general-ci, and others in the list using PHP myAdmin. But none of them is working for me.
Am I in the right way or I have to do something else.
Please suggest some help.
Thanks In Advance......
You have to choose the right transfer encoding either. Call
SET NAMES utf8
before inserting the data and make sure that the german words are utf8-encoded before inserting.
Try to use utf8_encode($string) to encode your text into UTF8 first, before saving it into the database. In order for characters to display correctly in a certain language, you have to (1) set the text into the right charset and then also (2) set a database to the right charset (as you did).
Also, for example, file display.php will output the German text, you can open the file in any editors (EmEditor?) and then "save as", choose a right encoding scheme. After that, the display file, when outputting the text, will take care of the charset.
years ago I've faced the same problem. I've solved it by implicit setting NAMES option for mysql. In my code it looks like this:
//inside AbstractMapper class
public function __construct($modelClass, $dbTable) {
$this->setDbTable($dbTable);
$stmt = new Zend_Db_Statement_Pdo($this->getDbTable()->getAdapter(), 'set names utf8');
$stmt->execute();
$this->_model_class = $modelClass;
}
After connecting to the database, use the following codes:
SET NAMES XXX
replace XXX with your working charset.