UTF-8 problems PHP/MySQL - php

I've always used ISO-8859-1 encoding, but I'm now going over to UTF-8.
Unfortunately I can't get it to work.
My MySQL DB is UTF-8, my PHP document is encoded in UTF-8, I set a UTF-8 charset, but it still doesn't work.
(it is special characters like æ/ø/å that doesn't work)
Hope you guys can help!

Make sure the connection to your database is also using this character set:
$conn = mysql_connect($server, $username, $password);
mysql_set_charset("UTF8", $conn);
According to the documentation of mysql_set_charset at php.net:
Note:
This is the preferred way to change the charset. Using mysql_query() to execute
SET NAMES .. is not recommended.
See also: http://nl3.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-set-charset.php
Check the character set of your current connection with:
echo mysql_client_encoding($conn);
See also: http://nl3.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-client-encoding.php
If you have done these things and add weird characters to your table, you will see it is displayed correct.

Remember to set connection encoding to utf8 as well.
In ext\mysqli do
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8")
In ext\mysql do
mysql_set_charset("utf8")
With other db extensions you might have to run query like
SET NAMES 'utf8'
Some more details about connection encoding in MySQL
As others point out, making sure your source code is utf-8 encoded also helps. Pay special attention to not having BOM (Byte Order Mark) - it would be sent to browser before any code is executed, so using headers or sessions would become impossible.

After connecting to db, run query SET NAMES UTF8
$db = new db(...);
$db->query('set name utf8');
and add this tag to header
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Are you having this error? MySql SELECT UNION Illegal mix of collations Error? Just set you entire mysql to utf 8 then
SET character_set_connection = utf8;

Try this after connecting to mysql:
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
And encode PHP document in UTF-8 without BOM.

I had the same problem but now its resolved. Here is the solution:
1st: update ur table
ALTER TABLE tbl_name
DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
2nd:
add this in the head section of the HTML code:
Regards
Saleha A.Latif

Nowadays PDO is the recommended way to use mysql. With that you should use the connection string to set encoding. For example: "mysql:host=$host;dbname=$db;charset=utf8"

Related

UTF-8 and German characters?

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.
I was using this code to get title:
$title = mysql_real_escape_string(htmlentities($_POST['title']));
I just override that to
$title = $_POST['title'];
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.
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.
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
in HTML5 use
<meta charset="utf-8">
in HTML 4.0.1 use
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
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
Set the data type in your database to use UTF-8 as well, this should solve the problem.
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');
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);

MySQL: ucs2_slovenian_ci to utf-8 on webpage

I have a MySQL database with tables in ucs2_slovenian_ci encoding. I would like to write content of tables on utf-8 encoding webpage. So far I tried with:
mysql_set_charset ("utf-8");
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf-8'");
...
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<?php echo utf8_encode($text); ?>
...
I'm still geting weird signs (question marks) instead of letters Š,Č,Ž
Nothing seems to work.
Weird thing is that with php command mysql_client_encoding($link) it says I have latin1 encoding. When I look page in Firefox it says UTF-8. What's wrong?
Please help.
ucs2_slovenian_ci encoding
That is not an encoding but a collation. A collation is the information on how something is sorted.
For your website, this isn't even of interest, because that's what the database knows about itself - or better: the data stored in itself.
For your website script's it's more important that you tell your database which encoding you need - here: UTF-8.
You signal that the database server by specifying the database client encoding. Consult your database client driver manual how to specify that. It could be that:
mysql_set_charset("utf8", $link);
Take care: it's utf8 while officially it's written UTF-8. That's something special with the MySQL database, write UTF-8 as utf8 when you set that parameter.
Do not use:
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf-8'");
because it's deprecated (not good, see as well the PHP manual and Whether to use “SET NAMES”).
And if you tell the database client which encoding you expect, you don't need to encode your own, like this:
utf8_encode($text);
Remove that stuff, you don't need it.
First add header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
and
mysql_set_charset ("utf-8");
should be:
$db = mysql_connect($hostname,$username,$password);
mysql_set_charset ("utf8", $db);
Also make sure what in MySQL DB everything in utf-8
Anyways you may play with:
mb_convert_encoding($string, "Other encoding", "UTF-8");

Get UTF-8 string from MySQL via PHP returned "????????"

In MySQL I have a string, which is displayed properly in phpmyadmin, with the collation set to utf8_general_ci .
In the PHP file, I have set the header using plain HTML:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
The php files are hosted on Ubuntu, Apache 2.2, and the files are saved in UTF-8 without BOM (using Notepad++)
I have set the connection to use utf8:
#mysql_query("set names 'utf8'", $this->link);
$r = #mysql_query($query, $this->link);
it returns the string ( varchar 255 ) and using PHP echo , it is displayed to the browser.
However, I am still getting ????? instead of the actual words.
I can't seem to be able to searched for what I might have missed, your help is much appreciated.
===== Edit =====
Database, table and column can have three different collations, I have set them all to utf8_general_ci , and calling mysql_set_charset('utf8') immediately after the connection is made, have solved my problem.
I hope this will act as a useful checklist for future people bumping into the same problem. I for one may very well return in a few months to check if I have missed anything :)
Thanks all for the great input.
Be sure your table is in utf8_general_ci.
Database and tables can have a different charset
(can happen when you change it by yourself).
And be careful with some functions, like htmlentities,
which have a default charset parameter set to ISO-8859-1 for PHP <5.4.0
(set to UTF-8 for PHP >5.4.0)
http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php
I think the quotes around 'utf8' are wrong, but either way, you can just use:
mysql_set_charset('utf8');
And suppressing errors with the # operator when you are looking for them, is not a good idea.
Check something like this before the query
mysql_query('SET character_set_results=utf8');
mysql_query('SET names=utf8');
mysql_query('SET character_set_client=utf8');
mysql_query('SET character_set_connection=utf8');
mysql_query('SET character_set_results=utf8');
mysql_query('SET collation_connection=utf8_general_ci');
you can use this to encode the strings to UTF-8 so it will not get ???, but will change the non urf-8 characters like this /u003. so you can decode it later to present it on a text
while($var=mysql_fetch_assoc($r)){
$e['columnI']=utf8_encode($e['columnI']);

MySQL db question marks instead of hebrew characters..?

I'm trying to build a shopping cart using PHP & MySQL.
my db in MySQL is utf8 and my table in the db is utf8,
How can I use Hebrew characters?
I was able to solve this by doing the following:
the db collation has to be utf8_general_ci
the collation of the table with hebrew has to be utf8_general_ci
in your php connection script put header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
in xhtml head tag put <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
after selecting the db in the connection script put mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
After a lot of work I found a solution that always works..:
without SET_NAMES.
In the conn.inc.php file, after you selected a database and connected to it, do this:
if(!mysqli_set_charset($conn, 'utf8')) {
echo 'the connection is not in utf8';
exit();
}
...and in the html always use charset utf-8;
That solved it for me. No need to use set_names(), which is ok but it annoyed the hell out of me.
You can use the PDO in your code like this:
$db = new PDO($config['DSN'], $config['dbUserName'], $config['dbPassword']);
$db->exec("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
Make sure you include the single quotation marks around the 'utf8'.
If it's an encoding problem (and it sounds like it is), this query will help:
SET NAMES utf8
Execute this query (e.g. mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8")) right after you connect and before you move any data.
More info
$conn->set_charset("utf8"); Use this for your dbconnect
Where are the question marks showing up? It may be an encoding problem somewhere other than in the data base.
To store non-ASCII characters in a database column, you need to define that column with a specific character set. You can specify a character set at 3 levels: database, table, and column. For example:
CREATE DATABASE db_name CHARACTER SET utf8
CREATE TABLE tbl_name (...) CHARACTER SET utf8
CREATE TABLE tbl_name (col_name CHAR(80) CHARACTER SET utf8, ...)
http://www.herongyang.com/PHP/Non-ASCII-MySQL-Store-Non-ASCII-Character-in-Database.html
In my case I created the DB from a dump, and this command solve it:
ALTER DATABASE <database_name> CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8') ..... Put this in Php

Save Accents in MySQL Database

I'm trying to save French accents in my database, but they aren't saved like they should in the DB.For example, a "é" is saved as "é".I've tried to set my files to "Unicode (utf-8)", the fields in the DB are "utf8_general_ci" as well as the DB itself.When I look at my data posted through AJAX with Firebug, I see the accent passed as "é", so it's correct.Thanks and let me know you need more info!
Personally I solved the same issue by adding after the MySQL connection code:
mysql_set_charset("utf8");
or for mysqli:
mysqli_set_charset($conn, "utf8");
or the mysqli OOP equivalent:
$conn->set_charset("utf8");
And sometimes you'll have to define the main php charset by adding this code:
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
On the client HTML side you have to add the following header data :
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
In order to use JSON AJAX results (e.g. by using jQuery), you should define the header by adding :
header("Content-type: application/json;charset=utf8");
json_encode(
some_data
);
This should do the trick
The best bet is that your database connection is not UTF-8 encoded - it is usually ISO-8859-1 by default.
Try sending a query
SET NAMES utf8;
after making the connection.
mysqli_set_charset($conn, "utf8");
if you use PDO, you must instanciate like that :
new \PDO("mysql:host=$host;dbname=$schema", $username, $password, array(\PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => 'SET NAMES utf8') );
Use UTF8:
Set a meta in your
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
When you connect to your mySQL DB, force encoding so you DONT have to play with your mysql settings
$conn = mysql_connect('server', 'user', 'password') or die('Could not connect to mysql server.');
mysql_select_db('mydb') or die('Could not select database.');
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$conn); //THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART
If you use AJAX, set you encoding like this:
header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
Have you reviewed http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-unicode.html:
Client applications that need to
communicate with the server using
Unicode should set the client
character set accordingly; for
example, by issuing a SET NAMES 'utf8'
statement. ucs2 cannot be used as a
client character set, which means that
it does not work for SET NAMES or SET
CHARACTER SET. (See Section 9.1.4,
“Connection Character Sets and
Collations”.)
Further to that:
if you get data via php from your
mysql-db (everything utf-8) but still
get '?' for some special characters in
your browser (), try this:
after mysql_connect() , and
mysql_select_db() add this lines:
mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8");
worked for me. i tried first with the
utf8_encode, but this only worked for
äüöéè... and so on, but not for
kyrillic and other chars.
You need to a) make sure your tables are using a character encoding that can encode such characters (UTF-8 tends to be the go-to encoding these days) and b) make sure that your form submissions are being sent to the database in the same character encoding. You do this by saving your HTML/PHP/whatever files as UTF-8, and by including a meta tag in the head that tells the browser to use UTF-8 encoding.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
Oh, and don't forget C, when connecting to the database, make sure you're actually using the correct character set by executing a SET NAMES charset=utf8 (might not be the correct syntax, I'll have to look up what it should be, but it will be along those lines)
PHP(.net) advises against setting charsets after connecting using a query like SET NAMES utf8 because your functionality for escaping data inside MySQL statements might not work as intended.
Do not use SET NAMES utf8 but use the appropriate ..._set_charset() function (or method) instead, in case you are using PHP.
Ok I have found a working solution for me :
Run this mysql command
show variables like 'char%';
Here you have many variables : "character_set_server", "character_set_system" etc.
In my case I have "é" for "é" in database and I want to show "é" on my website.
To work I have to change "character_set_server" value from "utf8mb4" to "latin1".
All my correct value are :
And other values are :
With theses values the wrong database accent are corrected and well displayed by the server.
But each case can be different.

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