Encoding to Hebrew - PHP, mysqli - php

Question

I'm using MySQLi to retrieve information from the database. All of my pages are encoded with UTF-8 without BOM, i have 2 pages to deal with, but the main problem is that on the database the information is showed in a regular way - but when i retrieve it it goes like this:
����� ����� - ���?
on the phpMyAdmin panel - the columns are latin1_general_ci (i tried to make it utf8_general as well - same output!).
the "mysql.php":
<?php
header('Content-type: text/xhtml; charset=windows-1255');
$mysql = new mysqli('localhost', 'elenbyin_vadim', 'pass33323', 'elenbyin_vadim');
?>
the "index.php", main parts:
<?php
include ('mysql.php');
include('functions.php');
if($_GET["lang"] == 'rus')
$lang = 'rus';
else if($_GET["lang"] == 'heb')
$lang = 'heb';
else
$lang = 'heb';
......
<div class="main_text">
<?
$result = $mysql->query('SELECT * FROM homepage');
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)){
echo "".$row['title']."<br />".$row['text_heb']."";
}
?>
</div>
can someone help my to solve this problem?

Answer 1

You'll have to change the charset for it to work:
<?php
$mysql->set_charset('utf8');
$result = $mysql->query('SELECT * FROM homepage');
...
?>
#Class's comment - If you need it in all your pages you can add it to mysql.php:
<?php
header('Content-type: text/xhtml; charset=windows-1255');
$mysql = new mysqli('localhost', 'elenbyin_vadim', 'pass33323', 'elenbyin_vadim');
$mysql->set_charset('utf8');
?>
Also, make sure you set your collation to utf8_general_ci.
An older method will be to set the names to utf8:
<?php
$mysql->query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
$result = $mysql->query('SELECT * FROM homepage');
...
?>
However according to set_charset() docs the first is preferrable:
Note: This is the preferred way to change the charset. Using
mysqli_query() to set it (such as SET NAMES utf8) is not recommended.
See the MySQL character set concepts section for more information.