[RESOLVED] Greek Character µ (mu) passed between MySQL, PHP, and HTML

Banacek

Hey guys, I was wondering what the best way to pass this one Greek character µ (mu) between MySQL, PHP, and HTML. I have the web pages encoded as UTF-8, and the MySQL Table set to UTF-8 as well. So what else should I do? I don't want to change the entire language, since everything else is in English. Thanks!

Banacek

Well, it seems to be working, but there seems to be garbage in the MYSQL field in front of the mu, but it displays correctly in the webpage. Odd.

MarkR

You need to ensure that it's UTF-8 all the way through. Simply having the table and the page UTF-8 is not enough.

You also need to tell MySQL that its connection character set is UTF-8, by sending

SET NAMES utf8;

On each connection (typically at the beginning of each page after you connect).

Otherwise MySQL will interpret it as its default (usually latin1), convert it to utf8, then do the reverse transformation. This will have several side effects:

Junk will be stored in the table
Fields won't be able to store strings their full length (e.g. char(10) may not be able to store 10 chars)
Collations (e.g. sorting, comparison) won't make much sense

And it's a severe error.

Unfortunately, if you have existing data, it will already have been trashed and you'll need to find out some (complicated) way of fixing it.

There are ways of fixing this but they're not straightforward. I'm assuming you have a significant amount of Greek text in your db which is screwed up in this way?

Mark

Banacek

MarkR wrote:
You need to ensure that it's UTF-8 all the way through. Simply having the table and the page UTF-8 is not enough.

You also need to tell MySQL that its connection character set is UTF-8, by sending
SET NAMES utf8;
On each connection (typically at the beginning of each page after you connect).

Otherwise MySQL will interpret it as its default (usually latin1), convert it to utf8, then do the reverse transformation. This will have several side effects:

Junk will be stored in the table

Fields won't be able to store strings their full length (e.g. char(10) may not be able to store 10 chars)

Collations (e.g. sorting, comparison) won't make much sense

And it's a severe error.

Unfortunately, if you have existing data, it will already have been trashed and you'll need to find out some (complicated) way of fixing it.

There are ways of fixing this but they're not straightforward. I'm assuming you have a significant amount of Greek text in your db which is screwed up in this way?

Mark

I must of missed that this was answered. Sorry.

Luckily, I don't have much data inputted yet. I'm still working out the details and how to set this up. Thank you for the help, I can set this up properly now...