Automatically changing languages on mySQL

[juminoz]

I'm currently working on a website that people from around the world uses it to send messages in their own languages to the refugee camps. Because it is for the World Expo in Japan, I currently set the database to Japanese (ja-sjis) so that it can record both English and Japanese. When I tried to enter a language like Thai into the database, everything showed up as "???". Is there a way to fix this problem?

My idea was to use PHP coding to detect the language and change the language of mySQL, but I have no idea how to do that. It seems like if I change the language of the database to the right language then I can enter a message in that language.

Thanks!!! 🙂

[konsu]

hello, maybe if you set your tables to use unicode (e.g. utf-8) you will be able to store strings in all languages? but i am not sure if this is what you are asking because you did not provide any implementation details and mentioned no concrete technical problem.

[juminoz]

Problem 1:

I think I know what the problem is. It's not just the database, but also how the user inputs data as well. It seems like if I set it to unicode (UTF-8) when inputting the data, the database would be able to record everything correctly. Is there a way to write a code to make sure that the language of the browser is changed to Unicode before user enter some data?

Problem 2:

There is also another problem that came with it. Because this website has been running for the past month, all the messages entered are in Japanese in various format. So if I change the encoding to Unicode, I can't actually read them. If I use SQL statement to transfer them into a new database, it still wouldn't work, would it. Is there a way to get SQL to read it in Japanese and translate it into unicode?

[konsu]

1. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
2. i would just dump the database with the data, create a new one with utf-8 tables, and write a script to move data from the old datrabase to the new one. the encoding conversion will be done during the move.