[RESOLVED] Please Please help !! Language Troubles

ab4net

Hi all,
thanking you in advance for the help my problem is:
iam using a non-latin language (it is arabic and chinese) for a program (for a client) well, i have posted 2, 3 rows in mysql table and i can see the text and read it very well (collation=utf8_Unicode_ci) but when i do Query the table all the fonts became question marks !! the encoding of the reading page is correct !!
all the results comes just like: ???? ??? ??????? ????? ??? ???? ?? ??
any idea, and many many thanks in advance .. .?!

herve

What version of PHP & MySQL are you using ?

Is the web server configured to display Unicode HTML page ?
(I'm talking about HTTP header, not HTML header)

Are you able to display Unicode HTML page ? (coming from an other site I mean)
It may be a font problem (not having an Unicode-capable font installed on the PC)

ab4net

i did not understand you clearly, what i have is IIS and PHP5 and the MySQL is 4.1
the problem i have another application on the same server, but the database imported from another servers, when i browse it on my server i got arabic fine, but this one ohhh ...
always when i create the table in any collationt he same i get, please if you can help you put me out of my mesery !! thanks alot ...
am now trying to read the MySQL documentation ... as well as the php.ini ...
wish i can get solution and waiting your help ...

herve

Are you using PHP 5.0.x or 5.1.x ?

You need 5.1.x or at least it should be easier with that version.

There are many things to check when you deal with Unicode. You have to check :

that data are correctly stored in the database (in Unicode)
Many info here : http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-mysql.html

You can use a "CREATE DATABASE db_name CHARACTER SET utf8;"
to specifiy the character set used in the whole database.

You can verify that your are using Unicode encoding on your columns
with : "SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM table_name;"
that your PHP program is able to deal with Unicode (PHP version 5.1.x)

Also you need to say a " SET NAMES='utf8' " with mysql_query() before
trying to deal with the data of you DB, otherwise the data will not be sent
back to you in Unicode encoding.

that the HTML source code say clearly it's in Unicode

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

in the <head> section.

that the browser is able to display Unicode content (with other web site, found on the
web, which use Unicode encoding, like this one : http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/utf8.html,
search for "arabic" word in that page )

That's all 🙂

ab4net

thanks alot i got it solved 🙂 thanks alot for you ..
it is some thing complicated ...
not related to the PHP and MySQL versions ..
hmm .. you can say it is a general thing ...
the point is to use the html encoding engine to convert the language to the actual unicode, then insert it into the table (only insert via HTML pages) then the data wont be readable int he table, unless you again retrive them via HTML page 🙂
good luck for all people facing the same problem of ???? in arabic 🙂
and thanks again

blackhorse

I may have the same problems. I am not dealing with Unicode. I am dealing with German, French, Dutch and English. So general encoding is fine.

I am sending these values within a table to a 3rd party site. They cannot display the characters right. So I am thinking about sending them htmlentities values. But I cannot apply the htmlentities to the whole table that I am sending. I should only apply the htmlentities to the German/French text between the html tags. Right?

ab4net

whats the harm to do all the data in the table .??!
i think it is safer, you are sending to other people application so you dont know if today they have proper encoding then may be it'll be changed later ...
safer to do for all ...

herve

I may have the same problems. I am not dealing with Unicode. I am dealing with German, French, Dutch and English. So general encoding is fine.

I am sending these values within a table to a 3rd party site. They cannot display the characters right. So I am thinking about sending them htmlentities values. But I cannot apply the htmlentities to the whole table that I am sending. I should only apply the htmlentities to the German/French text between the html tags. Right?

I've already answered you there : http://phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=10318706
in your own topic 😉