[RESOLVED] more probs with UTF-8 etc

VisionsOfCody

I've just transferred a site from one server to another and had to re-create the db

the problem's that now the characters with accents are displaying as '?'

I really can't figure out where the problem is :

// db :
ALTER DATABASE etalbio_001 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci

//db table field :
pan_nom_1 tinytext character set utf8 collate utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,

the page and the included files have all been saved with a unicode UTF-8 encoding and have the tag

as can be seen here : http://www.etal-bio.com/panier-bio-choose.php

but the accented letters still show as '?'

has anyone got any idea what i can do about this?

thanks

liquorvicar

Was your database exported in the correct character set? Have you checked to see whether your recreated database has the correct accented characters in it, or just question marks?

VisionsOfCody

yes - in the database the characters have the correct accents - it's when they're displayed in the page that it doesn't work

MarkR

It's entirely possible that despite your database being in utf8, the MySQL connection is still operating in latin1.

To be certain that it's going to do what you want, always issue a SET NAMES utf8; after each connection is established.

It's also feasible that your database is full of junk following some previous programming error. Sometimes these situations are difficult to recover from.

Mark

VisionsOfCody

MarkR wrote:
It's entirely possible that despite your database being in utf8, the MySQL connection is still operating in latin1.

To be certain that it's going to do what you want, always issue a SET NAMES utf8; after each connection is established.

I've never heard of that one - but I'll check it out and see what happens

MarkR wrote:
It's also feasible that your database is full of junk following some previous programming error. Sometimes these situations are difficult to recover from.

would it help to export the data as INSERTs and then re-create the database (there aren't a lot of tables) ?

thanks

VisionsOfCody

well,

one of the several things i tried seems to have worked

I did this too - hope it's the correct way to do it

		
$this->link = mysql_connect($this->host, $this->user, $this->pass);
mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8");
mysql_query("SET CHARACTER_SET utf8");
mysql_select_db($this->db);

thanks for your help

MarkR

The above will work but is unnecessarily complicated. "SET NAMES utf8" is a superset of "SET CHARACTER SET utf8" anyway, therefore the latter is superfluous.

Moreover, it should be "SET CHARACTER SET utf8", not CHARACTER_SET.

Aren't you seeing an error from that? If not, there is something severely wrong with your error handling.

Mark