Saving foreign characters into MySQL database

Ange52

So I'm working on this project that will allow students to track an English word through up to 30 languages. Each time the student learns what their given word is, they will fill out a simple form, and their word (in a new language) will be saved into the MySQL database so that they can view all of the words they have entered so far, and so that the teacher can view what all of the students have done, etc.

So how will this work when the language isn't French or Spanish, but Japanese, or Russian? Will MySQL be able to store the students' entries? Will PHP/HTML be able to display them successfully?

All guidance is welcome.

Thanks!
-Ange52

rachel2004

If you are using MySQL version 4.1 or later, the answer is yes, you can have different character sets (e.g English and Russian -- cyrillic). You will need to visit the MySQL manual for your options. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/charset-charsets.html

Here is a CREATE TABLE for a table that I have created for translating holding both Russian and English. Notice my specification of UTF-8:

CREATE TABLE `EnglishRussian` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `english` char(35) NOT NULL default '',
  `russian` char(35) NOT NULL default '',
  `vocabularyCategoryID` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
  KEY `english` (`english`),
  KEY `russian` (`russian`),
  KEY `vocabularyCategoryID` (`vocabularyCategoryID`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

As far as what you need to do in your PHP/HTML form, you should try to set your meta charset to UTF-8 as I have done:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Hope this helped.

Ange52

That makes for a great start- thank you, Rachel.

Could you point me to a list anywhere to help me find exactly which different character sets are supported by UTF-8? And if I put that line in my create table statement, as well as the meta line in my HTML, do you think that I will encounter many other problems allowing students to simply add/edit/view single words in different languages?

Thanks for the help thus far!
-Ange52

rachel2004

Unicode (which UTF-8 is based on) will support all character types to my knowledge. One of the primary reasons (if not the only reasons) it exists is to manage all different character sets.

You'll need to try creating a test table and a test HTML page, see if you can get it working. Hard for me to say if your students will be able to use it until you've done some testing.

The only thing that I can think will be an issue is to make sure that your operating system has other languages installed (such as the Cyrillic characters that you'd find in Russian) and keys on the keyboard that help them identify which keys to press.

Ange52

The sounds great. I will get to testing it out right now, but I am pretty confident that it will turn out just fine.

Thank you so much!!!! 🙂
-Ange52 🙂

Ange52

I know that this is coming back after about a month for the same issue, but I'm stuck again.

Take a look at this:
"SQL-query:

-- phpMyAdmin SQL Dump
-- version 2.6.0-pl2

-- http://www.phpmyadmin.net

-- Host: localhost
-- Generation Time: Aug 06, 2005 at 11:53 AM
-- Server version: 4.0.20

-- PHP Version: 4.3.11-dev

-- Database: `LOTW`

--
-- Table structure for table `entries`

CREATE TABLE entries (
entry_id int( 10 ) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT ,
user_id int( 10 ) NOT NULL ,
lang_id int( 10 ) NOT NULL ,
word varchar( 60 ) NOT NULL ,
translation varchar( 60 ) NOT NULL ,
PRIMARY KEY ( entry_id )
) TYPE = MYISAM DEFAULT CHARSET = utf8

MySQL said:

#1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8' at line 26"

Any tips for me?

rachel2004

You need version 4.1 or later of MySQL for Unicode character set support.