MySQL-Greek charsets & collations

yannis

I want to display Greek on my page.
The HTML is set to charset=iso-8859-7 and that works fine.

But when i insert Greek characters in MySQL i get ?????? on the part of the page that gets data from the database.
So which kind should i set the database variables to?
and also which variables i have to change. There are server, database collations, etc etc.

Anybody knows how to fix this ????

MarkR

You may want to use utf-8 instead - it's more flexible.

The things you need to do is:
1. Ensure that your tables are in the right encoding - when creating them, use the DEFAULT CHARSET parameter. You can change an existing table with ALTER TABLE (see the docs) - but this will take a long time on a large table (e.g. 1 million rows) and create downtime while it's doing it.
2. Your connection encoding is what you expect - this means that when pulling stuff into PHP it will be in that encoding (Hint: Use SET NAMES after connecting to the database each time)
3. Browser output and input is interpreted in the right encoding - typically this means adding a content-type header or meta tag
4. All other systems your application interacts with also use the right encoding (e.g. email)

Mark

yannis

i have done all the things you said and still get the ?????
At the connection file i put:

$con_nit = mysql_pconnect($hostname_con_nit, $username_con_nit, $password_con_nit) or trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR);

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'ISO-8859-7'");
mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'ISO-8859-7'");

the table created is:

CREATE TABLE table_article (
id int(4) NOT NULL default '0',
article longtext,
article2 longtext,
article3 longtext,
filename varchar(50) default NULL,
filesize varchar(50) default NULL,
filetype varchar(50) default NULL,
bin_data longblob,
photo2 longblob,
photo3 longblob,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
) DEFAULT CHARSET greek, TYPE=MyISAM;

and my HTML file has the meta tag:

still get ????????

MarkR

yannis wrote:
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'ISO-8859-7'");
mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'ISO-8859-7'");

The second command is unnecessary.

Are you SURE that those commands worked? DId you check the result? Did you get any errors or warnings on your log when you issued them? My copy of MySQL doesn't know what iso-8859-7 is.

You should ALWAYS check the results of any query. You should also ensure that your warning level is high enough that you notice these things (especially in your dev environment).

the table created is: ...
DEFAULT CHARSET greek, TYPE=MyISAM;

If your table's charset is "greek", why do you use "iso-8859-7" in your SET NAMES statement? That doesn't make any sense.

Try these things from the MySQL command line. If it doesn't work from there, it definitely won't in PHP.

Why not save yourself some effort and just use utf8? It's much more future-proof.

Mark