PHP and Mysql special chars - php

i haven't found the answer at this question browsing around so i guess asking it's ok...
My php code reads from my Mysql Database a string and prints it, here is the code
$sql2=mysql_query("SELECT * FROM Corsi WHERE Nome='$Ln_1[Ln_1]'");
$Ln_1_a = mysql_fetch_array($sql2);
$Ln_1_descr = $Ln_1_a[5];
But special chars, such as 'è' 'à' 'ò' etc. are printed as '�'.
My Mysql Encoding is utf8 and also in my html header i have utf8 encoding, so what is wrong with this?
Thanks in advance

First of all, at the start of your MySQL connection after database selection you should put this query:
mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8');
Then be sure, your page has encoding UTF-8 (I guess you are using HTML, so it should looks like:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
) and also your script file must be saved in UTF8 encoding.
But I have to remind mysql_* functions are deprecated and you should use mysqli_* or PDO instead with prepared statements due to safety of your queries.

Try (after mysql_connect) do mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8'). And also check, if font support these characters.

Use the utf8_decode function
like this
$Ln_1_descr = utf8_decode($Ln_1_a[5]);

Use htmlspecialchars($yourvariable, ENT_NOQUOTES, "UTF-8")
Also verify your MySQL configure file has:
[client]
default-character-set=UTF-8
[mysql]
default-character-set=UTF-8
Also, utf8_encode() and utf8_decode() would work for you as well.

Related

Why do I have to utf8_decode() my MySQL column value to get it to display properly?

I'm using CakePHP with App.encoding set to UTF-8, <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> present in my <head> and my MySQL database set to UTF-8 Unicode Encoding and utf8_general_ci collation. I also have "encoding"=>"UTF8" in my database.php connection details.
When I store a '£' symbol in the database table and view it using command line MySQL, the character displays correctly.
If I use CakePHP to fetch the rows from the database table and output them in my website, I see £ instead of my intended £ symbol.
However if I then use utf8_decode() to output my data, it displays correctly.
Is this correct? I have tried using htmlentities() to convert the £ symbol into £ but it outputs £ instead! Even when I use the additional parameters for charset.
Perhaps someone can help - I must have missed something here, but I thought that the characters should display correctly (in things like textarea HTML tags) if all your headers, meta tags etc were consistently UTF-8?
It sounds like the data in your database is wrong: the character £ is actually stored as the two characters £. You can confirm this by going to the database and using the hex and charset functions:
select charset(MyColumn), hex(MyColumn) from MyTable;
If the column is encoded in UTF-8, for the value '£' you should see output identical to this:
+---------------+-----------+
| utf8 | C2A3 |
+---------------+-----------+
If you see anything else, like if the charset column reports latin1 or if hex column reports C382C2A3, the data in the table is wrong. It can be fixed though, but the fix depends on the kind of error the data has. What do you get from charset and hex?
You can use htmlentities with third parameters to safely encode UTF-8 :
htmlentities("£", ENT_COMPAT, "UTF-8")
If all is in UTF8 remove the "encoding"=>"UTF8" in your database.php connection details:
$conn = mysql_connect($server, $username, $password);
//mysql_set_charset("UTF8", $conn); // REMOVED. ;)
mysql_select_db($database, $conn);

UTF8 encoded strings not shown correctly in MySQL

So I have programmed a crawler to scrape information and data from a website with charset utf8. But when I tried to store the contents into MySQL, some special characters, such as Spanish letters), did not show correctly in MySQL.
Here is what I have done:
Put header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8") in PHP
Set all charset in MySQL into utf8-unicode-ci
Have $conn->query("SET NAMES 'utf8'") this upon connection
Double checked that the html I parsed was encoded in utf-8
So what are some potentially problems here?
Maybe you coded your crawler using functions which are not supposed to manage multi-byte characters.
For example strlen instead of mb_strlen.
Try putting:
mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");
as first line of your php coce, and then check if you have to convert some functions in their respective mb version.
Have a look at multibyte string reference
As a last chance you may play with iconv function just before inserting the string into mysql.
Something as:
$utf8_string = iconv(iconv_get_encoding($string), "UTF-8", $string);
should do the trick
Start by checking if the data is stored wrong in the database, in which case the problem is with your crawler. Otherwise the problem is in your presentation.
To test this, I would suggest that you use a dedicated mysql client (Such as the command line client) to inspect data.
I remember pulling my hair out in dealing with UTF8 issues until I started adding this to my header:
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF-8');

How do I debug not working characters in PHP/HTML/MySQL?

I am building a webpage in HTML with PHP and MySQL and I ran into trouble with swedish characters ÅÄÖ when running page. They show up as � instead of Å/Ä/Ö.
I have set the charset to UTF-8 in both HTML meta-tag and via PHP:
<?php
header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
?>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
Also, MySQL runs utf8_general_ci collation on all tables.
All files should also be encoded and saved as UTF-8 without Unicode Signature (BOM) and no normalization form.
All this have worked flawless before, but today, nomather what I try I do end up with � instead of Å/Ä/Ö. Is there a good way to debug this and find the problem?
Is any of my steps unnecessary or have I forgotten anything?
What you need from deceze's article is the part regarding the SET NAMES:
mysql_set_charset('utf8', $connection); //not mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
Just add that at the beginning of your php code, after the database connection was started
You may try save your php files in UTF-8 encoding. I assume the files are written in something else (possibly ISO-xxxx or ANSI)
To do that with Notepad++, select all the lines and copy to clipboard, change the coding to UTF-8 without BOM in encoding menu, then paste over everything and save.
Is this for only few records or all records with swedish characters?
You can change the page encoding manually in browser settings - this is how you test it: change it to latin1/iso-8854-1 to see if it displays these correctly that are wrong as utf-8.
Chances are someone is using browser that is not supporting utf8 or fiddled with the encoding manually.
Also make sure you db connection is utf8 too. (set names utf8;)

how to display this chinese character?

I already set mySQL Collation as utf8_unicode_ci, if I manual insert chinese character in my database, it's successful work to displaying chinese character, but once i use my code, it was display this
ã€å¼µç‘žæŒ¯ã€æ±Ÿç¥¥ç¶�..
I had add this <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" ></meta> in my header, I had try utf8_encode ,but still the same problem happen.
thank you and hope you guy reply me soonest
Have you set the connection character set / collation? Execute this query immediately after creating a connection
SET NAMES 'utf8'
You have probably forgot to execute this query after connecting
SET NAMES utf8
Try it and you'll see
there 2 steps you should do
add a query with UTF8
$query = "SET NAMES 'utf8'";
mysql_query($query);
make sure your file is encoded as UTF8,
open your script with your favourite editor and save as UTF8
To ensure MySQL expects UTF-8 encoding by default from client connections, use the following query:
SET NAMES 'utf8'
In addition, make sure PHP interprets the string as UTF-8 string. Since PHP does not support multibyte characters, you must use a function to allow PHP to work with UTF-8 strings:
utf8_decode()
or something.

Inserting into mysql database with asian symbols such as ’ —

I cant seem to get these Chinese punctuation marks to work with my database (utf-8)
when i do an echo of the query the marks look like this
���
in php i have already done
$text=mysql_real_escape_string(htmlentities($text));
so as a result they are not saved into the database correctly what can i do to fix this?
Thanks
Executing mysql_query('SET NAMES utf-8'); before any operations with unicode will do the trick
Try using using utf8_encode() function while inserting into db and utf8_decode() while printing the same.
Add the character 'N' before your string value.
Eg. select from test_table where temp=N'unicode string'
besides if you want to use htmlentities, you have to set it to utf-8 encoding like that:
htmlentities($string,ENT_COMPAT,"UTF-8");
Don't put HTML-encoded data in the database. It should be raw text until the time you spit it onto the page (at which point you should use htmlspecialchars().
You need to make sure that both your database and your page are using UTF-8:
ensure your tables are CREATEd with a UTF-8 collation;
use mysql_set_charset after connecting to ensure the connection between MySQL and PHP is UTF-8;
set the Content-Type of the page to text/html;charset=utf-8 by header or meta tag.
You can get away with using a different encoding such as the default latin-1 on the database end and the connection if you treat it as bytes, but case-insensitive comparisons won't work if you do, so it's best to stick to UTF-8.

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