Re: character sets

From: NC (nc_at_iname.com)
Date: 02/01/05 

Date: 1 Feb 2005 13:40:47 -0800

WindAndWaves wrote:
>
> The encoding that I use on my webpage is:
> <META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
>
> When people enter new data I use
> $newvalue = htmlentities($_POST["newvalue"], ENT_QUOTES)
>
> I then SQL this into my table and next I display the value
> e.g. <DIV CLASS="content">'.$newvalue.'</DIV>
>
> All of this works fine, BUT, funny characters that may have been
> entered through the form (e.g. Word-Style quotation marks,
> e-accent-grave, etc..) are taking on a whole new life.
> I put in an e with an accent and it changed into a chinese
> character.

You have two options to fix this:

1. Convert your strings from UTF-8 into, say, ISO-8859-1,
before storing them in the database:

$string = iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1', $string);

You will need your PHP installation to be compiled
with iconv extension to do that.

2. Set your MySQL server's character set to UTF-8.

First, check if you currently have UTF-8 support.
Run this query:

SHOW VARIABLES;

find the `character_sets` variable in the output and
verify that `utf8` is listed among the character sets
currently supported. If there's no support for UTF-8,
install or configure it (see MySQL documentation for
details).

If and when you have UTF-8 support, you can set
UTF-8 as the default character set for your database:

ALTER DATABASE db_name
DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;

Alternatively, you can change character set setting
on a per-connection basis by sending this query:

SET NAMES 'utf8';

first thing after establishing a connection to the
database.

Cheers,
NC

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