Polish characters in mysql response - php

Question

I have a problem with polish characters. I can't get correctly written words, like '?ukasz' instead of "Łukasz" or even "null", when it supposed to be "Kraków". I tried "mysql_set_charset('utf-8'/'iso-8859-1')" after mysql_connect or iconv(on json_encode($output)) and it's still the same (except now there is "Krak\u00f3" instead of "null"). I'll appreciate any help.
This is a php file for my Android app:
$id_client = $_REQUEST['id_klienta'];
$con=mysql_connect('localhost', 'root', '') or die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db('courier_helper') or die(mysql_error());
$sql=mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `clients` WHERE id_klienta='$id_client'");
while($r=mysql_fetch_assoc($sql))
$output[]=$r;
print(json_encode($output));
mysql_close($con);
?>

Answer 1

You have to make sure, that you are using UTF-8 everywhere:
script file encoding (UTF-8 instead of ANSI) - you can set encoding it in Notepad++
html code (meta charset)
database table charset (when you are creating table or database)
database mysql_set_charset('utf8', $connection_obj);
database SET NAMES utf8 - run that SQL command after connecting
And one more thing - get familiar with PDO. This is my PDO connect function I use:
function DbConnect()
{
$db_host = "localhost";
$db_name = "database_name";
$db_user = "your_username";
$db_pass = "your_passwd";
$link = new PDO("mysql:host=$db_host;dbname=$db_name; charset=UTF-8", $db_user, $db_pass);
$link->exec("set names utf8;");
return $link;
}
You can use that function like this (this is PDO example):
$link = DbConnect();
$query = $link->prepare("SELECT id FROM wp_users");
$query->execute();
$result = $query->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

Answer 2

You should have your database storing data as UTF8, which means converting your existing tables.
ALTER TABLE tablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
You also need to make sure your connection to the database is UTF8. You can make sure of that by running a SET NAMES query right after your connect.
SET NAMES UTF8
As others mentioned, you should start using PDO.