Lithuanian characters not saving correctly into MySQL DB - php

Question

Once again I'm having problems with saving special characters into a database. After lots of searchs I still could not find solution so I am starting a new thread.
I have MySQL DB using UTF-8 character set and PHP application that reads data from XML files into DB. Earlier I had problems with estonian characters, which I managed to solve. For example & scaron; (š) is in XML as html entity & eth; and it is converted in PHP to & #353;. Earlier in PHP script I run mysql query "SET NAMES utf8". š saves into DB correctly.
Now I'm fighting with lithuanian characters, for example ų (& #371), which is as numeric entity, & #371;, in XML file. I am not doing any conversion for this in PHP since I assume that when & eth; converted to & #353; works with scaron, shouldn't & #371; save into DB as ų without PHP conversion? After save that appears in DB as question mark and if I try to use mb_convert_encoding() or html_entity_decode() result is ų.
Any advice?

Answer 1

You simple should make sure your table has correct encoding and run SET names just after connection.
I've prepared simple test. Try to run it to make sure everything works fine.
1) Create database testencoding and import the following code to it
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `sample` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`value` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
--
ALTER TABLE `sample`
ADD PRIMARY KEY (`id`);
2) Create simple PHP script with following content and run it:
<?php
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
mb_internal_encoding('utf-8');
$subjectvalue='ų ų';
$link = mysqli_connect("localhost","root","","testencoding");
mysqli_query($link,"SET NAMES 'utf8'");
mysqli_query($link,"INSERT INTO sample(`value`) VALUES('".mysqli_real_escape_string($link,$subjectvalue)."')");
$result = mysqli_query($link, "SELECT * FROM sample");
echo "<br /><br />Data from database<br /><br />";
while ($data = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
echo $data['id'].' '.$data['value']."<br />";
}
3) On my PC all results are as expected:
As output from PHP file I have:
Data from database
1 ų ų
In phpMyadmin I have:
ų ų
So everything works fine. Try it and compare with my results