I am transfering the database from one server to another server using phpmyadmin. I successfully transfered it but having issue with swedish characters. I can see the swedish characters are displaying properly within the tables but in php pages it is wrong seems like double encoded or any other problem. Can anyone help?
The problem could be lying in different parts. Welcome to the world of Unicode!
Make sure the collation for the columns in MySQL is utf8_* (I personally prefer utf8_bin).
Make sure the PHP page is telling the client that the contents are encoded with UTF8. That can/should be done in two ways:
Set the following header: header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
In your HTML <head> add the correct meta tag: <meta charset="utf-8">
(note: while in theory it's not strictly necessary to do both, as they're equivalent for the client, it's better to be redundant!)
Make sure the connection with MySQL uses UTF8. That can be done by executing a simple query right after the connection to the database: SET NAMES 'utf8' (e.g. mysqli_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'"); alter it accordingly if you're using PDO or the MySQLi OOP APIs).
Bonus: if you're using UTF8 in your PHP script, make sure you treat everything in an Unicode-safe way. So, prefer using mb_* functions to manipulate strings, use the u flag with preg_* functions, etc. And remember than UTF8 characters are variable in the number of bytes they use, from 1 to 4!
I have same setting for my both website only problem is with database after transfering it to an other server. Encoding of pages are same on both sites.
you can check it here
http://www.abswheels.se
http://www.dackis.se/abs/
you can see the difference. any sugguestions??
also everything is fine inside the database. I dont know why when i fetch the data with special character from database it has a problem. you can see the title bar of both website. everything is same on client side. same encoding same setting
Related
I have a mysql database storing some fields in greek characters. In my html I have charset=utf-8 and my database columns are defined with encoding utf_general_ci. But I was not setting the connection encoding so far. As a result I have a database that doesn't display the greek characters well, but when reading back in PHP, it all shows well.
Now I try to do this the right way, so I added also in my database functions.
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");
This works great for new entries.
But for existing entries, the problem is that when I read data in PHP, it comes garbled, since now the connection encoding has changed.
Is there a way to fix my data and make them useful again? I can continue working my old way, but I know it's wrong and can cause me more problems in the future.
I solved this issue as follows:
in a PHP script, retrieve the information as I do now, i.e without setting the connection. This way the mistake will be inverted and corrected and in your php file you will have the characters in the correct utf-8 format.
in the same PHP script, write back the information with setting the connection to utf-8
at this point the correct characters are in the database
I changed all my read/write functions of your site to use the utf-8 from now on
I have a form in my page for users to leave a comment.
I'm currently using this charset:
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1"
but retrieveving the comment from DB accents are not displaying correct ( Ex. è =>è ).
Which parameters should i care about for a correct handling of accents?
SOLVED
changed meta tag to charset='utf-8'
changed character-set Mysql (ALTER TABLE comments CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf-8)
changed connection character-set both when inserting records and retrieving ($conn->query('SET NAMES utf8'))
Now accents are displaying correct
thanks
Luca
Character sets can be complicated and pain to debug when it comes to LAMP web applications. At each of the stages that one piece of software talks to another there's scope for incorrect charset translation or incorrect storage of data.
The places you need to look out for are:
- Between the browser and the web server (which you've listed already)
- Between PHP and the MySQL server
The character you've listed look like normal a European character that will be included in the ISO-8859-1 charset.
Things to check for:
even though you're specifying the character set in a meta header have a look in your browser to be sure which character set the browser is actually using. If you've specified it the browser should use that charset to render/view the page but in cases I've seen it attempting to auto-detect the correct charset and failing. Most browsers will have an "encoding" menu (perhaps under "view") that allows you to choose the charset. Ensure that it says ISO-8859-1 (Western European).
MySQL can happily support character set conversion if required to but in most cases you want to have your tables and client connection set to use the same encoding. When configured this way MySQL won't attempt to do any encoding conversion and will just write the data you input byte for byte into the table. When read it'll come out the same way byte for byte.
You've not said if you're reading data from the database back out with the same web-app or with some other client. I'd suggest you try to read it out with the same web application and using the same meta charset header (again, check the browser is really setting it) and see what is displayed in the browser.
To debug these issues requires you to be really sure about whether the client/console you're using is doing any conversion too, the safest way is sometimes to get the data into a hex editor where you can be sure that nothing else is messing around with any translation.
If it doesn't look like it's a browser-side problem please can you include the output of the following commands against your database:
Run from a connection that your web-app makes (not from some other MySQL client):
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set%';
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'collation%';
Run from any MySQL client:
SHOW CREATE TABLE myTable;
(where myTable is the table you're reading/writing data from/to)
The ISO-8859-1 character set is for Latin characters only. Try UTF-8, and make sure that the database these characters are coming from are also UTF-8 columns.
I have had no end of problems trying to do what I thought would be relatively simple:
I need to have a form which can accept user input text in a mix of English an other languages, some multi-byte (ie Japanese, Korean, etc), and this gets processed by php and is stored (safely, avoiding SQL injection) in a mysql database. It also needs to be accessed from the database, processed, and used on-screen.
I have it set up fine for Latin chars but when I add a mix of Latin andmulti-byte chars it turns garbled.
I have tried to do my homework but just am banging my head against a wall now.
Magic quotes is off, I have tried using utf8_encode/decode, htmlentities, addslashes/stripslashes, and (in mysql) both "utf8_general_ci" and "utf8_unicode_ci" for the field in the table.
Part of the problem is that there are so many places where I could be messing it up that I'm not sure where to begin solving the problem.
Thanks very much for any and all help with this. Ideally, if someone has working php code examples and/or knows the right mysql table format, that would be fantastic.
Here is a laundry list of things to check are in UTF8 mode:
MySQL table encoding. You seem to have already done this.
MySQL connection encoding. Do SHOW STATUS LIKE 'char%' and you will see what MySQL is using. You need character_set_client, character_set_connection and character_set_results set to utf8 which can easily set in your application by doing SET NAMES 'utf8' at the start of all connections. This is the one most people forget to check, IME.
If you use them, your CLI and terminal settings. In bash, this means LANG=(something).UTF-8.
Your source code (this is not usually a problem unless you have UTF8 constant text).
The page encoding. You seem to have this one right, too, but your browsers debug tools can help a lot.
Once you get all this right, all you will need in your app is mysql_real_escape_string().
Oh and it is (sadly) possible to successfully store correctly encoded UTf8 text in a column with the wrong encoding type or from a connection with the wrong encoding type. And it can come back "correctly", too. Until you fix all the bits that aren't UTF8, at which point it breaks.
I don't think you have any practical alternatives to UTF-8. You're going to have to track down where the encoding and/or decoding breaks. Start by checking whether you can round-trip multi-language text to the data base from the mysql command line, or perhaps through phpmyadmin. Track down and eliminate problems at that level. Then move out one more level by simulating input to your php and examining the output, again dealing with any problems. Finally add browsers into the mix.
First you need to check if you can add multi-language text to your database directly. If its possible you can do it in your application
Are you serializing any data by chance? PHPs serialize function has some issue when serializing non-english characters.
Everything you do should be utf-8 encoded.
One thing you could try is to json_encode() the data when putting it into the database and json_decoding() it when it's retrieved.
The problem was caused by my not having the default char set in the php.ini file, and (possibly) not having set the char set in the mysql table (in PhpMyAdmin, via the Operations tab).
Setting the default char set to "utf-8" fixed it. Thanks for the help!!
Check your database connection settings. It also needs to support UTF-8.
I'm still learning the ropes with PHP & MySQL and I know I'm doing something wrong here with how character sets are set up, but can't quite figure out from reading here and on the web what I should do.
I have a standard LAMP installation with PHP 5, MySQL 5. I set everything up with the defaults. When some of my users input comments to our database some characters show up incorrectly - mostly apostrophes and em dashes at the moment. In MySQL apostrostrophes show up as ’. They display on the page this way also (I'm using htmlentities to output user comments).
In phpMyAdmin it says my MySQL Charset is UTF8-Unicode.
In my database my tables are all set up with the default Latin1-Swedish-ci.
My web pages all have meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"
When I look at the site's http headers I see: Content-Type: text/html
Like a newbie, I hadn't considered character sets at all until things started looking odd on some of my pages. So does it make most sense for me to convert everything to utf-8 and will this affect my PHP code? Or should I try to get it all into Latin? And do I have to go into the database and replace these odd codes, or will they magically display once I set up the charsets properly? All the fiddling I've done so far hasn't helped (I set the http headers to utf-8, and also tried latin).
If you really want to understand these issues, I would start by reading this article at mysql.com. Basically, you want every piece of the puzzle to expect UTF-8 unicode. On the PHP side, you want to do something like:
<?php header("Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8");?>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" value="text/html; charset=utf-8">
And when you run your insert queries you want to make sure both the table's character encoding and the encoding that you're running the queries in are UTF-8. You can accomplish the latter by running the query SET NAMES utf8 right before you run an insert query.
http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/charsets
That site gave me a lot of good advice on how to make everything play nice in UTF-8.
I also recomened switching from htmlentities to htmlspecialchars as it is more UTF friendly.
The main point is to make sure everything is talking the same language. Your database, your database connection, your PHP, your page is in utf8 (should have a meta tag and a header saying so).
Sorry for not understanding all of your question. But when part of the question is "UTF-8 or not?", the answer is: "UTF-8, of course!"
You definitely want to sort things out now rather than later. One of the most important programming rules is not to keep going with a bad idea - don't dig yourself in any deeper!
As latin1 and utf-8 are compatible, you can convert your tables to use utf-8 without manipulating the data contained by hand. MySQL will sort this part out for you.
It's then important to check that everything is speaking utf-8. Set the http headers in apache or use a meta tag - this says to a browser that the HTML output is utf-8.
With this in mind, you need to make sure all of the data you send really is utf-8! Configure your IDE to save php/html files as utf-8. Finally make sure that PHP is using a utf-8 connection to MySQL - issue this query after connecting:
SET NAMES 'utf-8';
i'm completely confused by what i've read about character sets. I'm developing an interface to store french text formatted in html inside a mysql database.
What i understood was that the safe way to have all french special characters displayed properly would be to store them as utf8. so i've created a mysql database with utf8 specified for the database and each table.
I can see through phpmyadmin that the characters are stored exactly the way it is supposed to. But outputting these characters via php gives me erratic results: accented characters are replaced by meaningless characters. Why is that ?
do i have to utf8_encode or utf8_decode them? note: the html page character encodign is set to utf8.
more generally, what is the safe way to store this data? Should i combine htmlentities, addslashes, and utf8_encode when saving, and stripslashes,html_entity_decode and utf8_decode when i output?
MySQL performs character set conversions on the fly to something called the connection charset. You can specify this charset using the sql statement
SET NAMES utf8
or use a specific API function such as mysql_set_charset():
mysql_set_charset("utf8", $conn);
If this is done correctly there's no need to use functions such as utf8_encode() and utf8_decode().
You also have to make sure that the browser uses the same encoding. This is usually done using a simple header:
header('Content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8');
(Note that the charset is called utf-8 in the browser but utf8 in MySQL.)
In most cases the connection charset and web charset are the only things that you need to keep track of, so if it still doesn't work there's probably something else your doing wrong. Try experimenting with it a bit, it usually takes a while to fully understand.
I strongly recomend to read this article "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" by Joel Spolsky, to understand what are you doing and why.
It is useful to consider the PHP-generated front end and the MySQL backend separate components. MySQL should not have to worry about display logic, nor should PHP assume that the backend does any sort of preprocessing on the data.
My advice would be to store the data in plain characters using utf8 encoding, and escape any dangerous characters with MySQLs methods.
PHP then reads the utf8 encoded data from database, processes them (with htmlentities(), most often), and displays it via whichever template you choose to use.
Emil H. correctly suggested using
SET NAMES utf8
which should be the first thing you call after making a MySQL connection. This makes the MySQL treat all input and output as utf8.
Note that if you have to use utf8_encode or utf8_decode functions, you are not setting the html character encoding correctly. It is easiest to require that every component of your system uses utf8, since that way you should never have to do manual encoding/decoding, which can cause hard to track issues later on.
In adition to what Emil H said, you also need this in your page head tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />