db insert problem with Unicode Characters

[kamy99]

Hi:

I searched the forums but couldn't find what I need, so hopefully you can help me here. 🆒 🆒

My question is:

What are all steps necessary to insert unicode characters into mySQL db correctly ?

I have built a simple multi-lingual website which displays articles in 4 languages: English, French, Farsi, Kurdi.

The problems I'm having are all related to the Farsi/Kurdi parts. These languages use unicode characters, so I set my characters setting to UTF-8 in my meta tags.

Problems occur while inserting data into mySQL db.

Basically I have a form which takes the article and submits it to the db. The actual submit code works and I use addslashes() to insert the data.

My inset code look like this:

$sql=
mysql_query("INSERT INTO articles ( `article_id` , `article_title_eng` , `article_body_eng` , `article_title_far` , `article_body_far` , `article_title_krd` , `article_body_krd` , `article_title_lat` , `article_body_lat` , `article_title_fre` , `article_body_fre` , `article_date` , `article_author` , `article_publish` , `article_cat` ) VALUES ('','".addslashes($_POST['article_title_eng'])."', '".addslashes($_POST['article_body_eng'])."', '".addslashes($_POST['article_title_far'])."', '".addslashes($_POST['article_body_far'])."', '".addslashes($_POST['article_title_krd'])."', '".addslashes($_POST['article_body_krd'])."','".addslashes($_POST['article_title_lat'])."', '".addslashes($_POST['article_body_lat'])."', '".addslashes($_POST['article_title_fre'])."', '".addslashes($_POST['article_body_fre'])."', '".addslashes($_POST['article_date'])."', '".addslashes($_POST['article_author'])."', '0', '$_POST[article_cat]')");

But it seems data inserted into Farsi/Kurdi sections gets chopped somehow.

The mySQL filed for those sections is used as UTF-persian .

I can provide any info needed.

THANX
kamy

[MarkR]

addslashes is not the correct way to escape strings for mysql. Try mysql_real_escape_string instead, which takes encoding into account.

You should also ensure that your MySQL client and server encoding is set to utf-8. If it is not, bad things may happen.

Finally you'll need to ensure that all your PHP files (and any other files they read) are written in utf-8 themselves (Or ASCII, which is a subset of UTF-8 anyway).

The problem really starts when PHP doesn't understand UTF-8 strings properly, so some functions like strlen() will give the wrong result. Therefore, you should set the mbstring internal encoding to utf-8 (which might be the default anyway), and always use mb_strlen() and related functions.

For regular expressions, use preg and always specify the "u" flag to have it treat everything as UTF-8. Don't use ereg or other non-UTF8 compliant extensions.

Mark