UTF-8 and German characters? - php

Question

I have problem with German characters on my web site,
in html/php part of website i have this code to set utf-8:
<meta charset="utf-8">
in mysql, i have this code to set utf-8
SET CHARSET 'utf8';
Here is some word on German: Gemäß
Here is how that word looks in mysql table:
Gemäß
Here is how that word is shown on the site: Gemäß
What is a problem? Thanks.

Answer 1

I was using this code to get title:
$title = mysql_real_escape_string(htmlentities($_POST['title']));
I just override that to
$title = $_POST['title'];

Answer 2

At first, make sure, that you have UTF-8 characters in your database.
After that, try using SET NAMES 'UTF8' after connecting to MySQL:
$con=mysqli_connect("host", "user", "pw", "db");
if (!$con)
{
die('Failed to connect to mySQL: ' .mysqli_connect_errno());
}
mysqli_query($con, "SET NAMES 'UTF8'") or die("ERROR: ". mysqli_error($con));
As the manual says:
SET NAMES indicates what character set the client will use to send SQL
statements to the server... It also specifies the character set that the server should
use for sending results back to the client.

Answer 3

Try SET NAMES 'utf8' or SET NAMES 'utf-8'. Some of these works fine for portuguese, probably for german too. I just can't remember which one is correct, but if it is not, an error will be produced.

Answer 4

you should make sure that the CONNECTION is also utf-8.
with mysqli this is done with something like this:
$connection = mysqli_connect($host, $user, $pass, $db_name);
$connection->set_charset("utf8");
Now if somehow you ended up with wrong characters in the database there is a way to make it right:
in a PHP script, retrieve the information as you 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 a PHP script, write back the information with setting the connection to utf-8
at this point you should see the character correct in your database
now change all your read/write functions of your site to use the utf-8 from now on

Answer 5

in HTML5 use
<meta charset="utf-8">
in HTML 4.0.1 use
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Answer 6

the results are html entity encoded as if they were processed by htmlentities(), I wonder if your variables are ibserted as received from the form or are being processed by say a wysiwg editor for instance?
Anyway, these should print fine on an html template but an html_entity_decode() should do it to.
Hope this helps

Answer 7

Set the data type in your database to use UTF-8 as well, this should solve the problem.

Answer 8

I had the same problem. which I solved by using:
if you have already created your table, you need the modify the character set as:
alter table <table name> convert to character set utf8 collate utf8_general_ci.
your tables character set is set to latin_swedish by default by MySQL.
also, you might face some problems while retrieving the data and displaying it to you page.For that include: mysql_set_charset('utf8') just below the line where you have connected your database.
eg:
mysql_connect('localhost','root','');
mysql_select_db('my db');
mysql_set_charset('utf8');

Answer 9

You will need to do this for php 5.x
$yourNiceLookingString =
htmlspecialchars ($YourStringFromDB, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, 'ISO-8859-1');
and for php 4.x
$yourNiceLookingString = htmlspecialchars($YourStringFromDB);