[RESOLVED] Special Charac. OK in PhpMyAdmin, NOK in output.

[helil]

I'm inputing text in a table with special characters (Spanish and Portuguese). They seem OK when I browse through the table in PhpMyAdmin, but the query doesn't display right in Firefox nor IE (sub. by little squares or question marks).

I have the charset utf-8 declared in the html files.
MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
MySQL connection collation: utf8_general_ci
Collation for each text column: utf8_general_ci

If I substitute text in cells (by é, for instance) it displays OK, but I wouldn't like to do this for every entry.

• How to make it display right?

• Is collation for sorting characters in different orders only, having nothing to do with my current problem?

[Roger_Ramjet]

Pain in the proverbials ain't it 😃

Yes, collation defines the sort order for the specific charset.

Amongst the various pains I encountered when choosing UTF-8 for a mysql db was the need to set the charset every time I opened a connection to it. Now I'm using PDO and in that you code

$this->dbh->query("SET NAMES utf8");

(and obviously I'm using a db class as well 🆒 )

Not sure how you do it with plain old mysql_connect. I do know you can check the setting on a connection using mysql_client_encoding to see if that is the cause of the unprintable problem.

[edit]
Here's an amusing article on/and off the topic of Unicode
[/edit]

[helil]

Thank you very much, it solved the problem when I used a

mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8"); , just between the connection and the query itself.

Also, thanks for the tip on the PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension and the great article