5 languages, one page, MySql

obmon

hello and thanks in advance for any help provided.

I am about to start developing a website that will require 5 different languages. To test language support, I have created a mysql table with 2 fields.. 'langID' & 'text'.

The table is very simple and only has 5 rows. The first field has the name of the language and the second field has a paragraph or so of random text in the specified language. Both Feilds have the collation set to "utf8_unicode_ci".

I used phpmyadmin to create the table and populate it. From within phpmyadmin I can see the text fields in the correct language and everything is fine. also from within phpmyadmin i can click a link and the full table is outputted into an html page (obviously generated using php). This page is also fine. All the languages display correctly.

My problem is when I create a page to extract the data and display it myself. Arabic and Japanese do not show at all (i only get "?" instead of characters) and the spanish and german languages also do not display correctly (tiny question marks for certain characters).

I'm not sure where to go from here.. I have read a lot about the mbString functionality of php and got nowhere. Also looked at the GetText functions but that seems to be over the top.

How can phpmyadmin display the languages correctly (print view) but i can't do the same with my code?

my code is as follows, very simple:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Language Test Page</title>
</head>

<body>

<?php

// database connect information
$dbhost = "localhost";
$dbuser = "root";
$dbpass = "";
$dbname = "test";

// Connect to MySql
$connect = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass)
	or die("Unable to connect to MySql : mysql_error()");

// Connect to Database
$db = mysql_select_db($dbname, $connect)
	or die("Unable to connect to Database : mysql_error()");

// SQL to retreive Data
$sql = "SELECT * FROM lang";
$result = mysql_query($sql)
	or die("unable to retrieve data:" . mysql_error());

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
	$lang = $row["langID"];
	$text = $row["text"];

print ("<b>".$lang."</b><br>".$text."<br><br><br>");
}

?>



</body>
</html>

Please help. I'm getting as frustrated as a postal worker here...

Kudose

It could be that you are requesting the display of multiple character sets and your browser only supports showing one character set at a time.

obmon

no, thats not it. I can view and print pages with Arabic, German, Spanish, and Japanese both in Firefox and in IE. Plus, like I said in my post, phpMyAdmin outputs an HTML page with the full texts of the table and all the languages are showing correctly.

The problem is in my code. Not my browser.

__berfuzz

What happens if you try:
file.html

<p>Text with arabic letters.</p>
<p>German text, å ü etc.</p>

With the meta tag you're using. Just as a way to start ruling out what's not wrong. If this works there must be something wrong in the way utf8 from server is int

obmon

I did that too.. tested it that way with the php code extracting the data from the db.. and right below it is a table with the 5 languages in plain html. The table is correct... the php output isn't.

It has to be in my code. or in my php configuration..... just what can it be?

obmon

no help at all? No one can help? this can't be...

obmon

I finally found what was going wrong..

i added the following line to my code before i run the sql query, and all works well.

I can't believe no one in this forum saw that!!!

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'")