Entity madness ..

[Desdinova]

I'm having some issues with entities here. I'm building a german website, so that means I have to process chars like ü/ö/ï etc.

My doctype is UTF-8. My database collation is utf8_general_ci.

I have forms with inputs, these inputs are stored in a database and then read out on a website.

When I enter ü/ö/ï in the input field, I want them to be stored in the database like ü, ö and ï. Instead, it 'translates' these chars to üïö.

Funny thing is, when I edit the record in the form field, the üïö string magically is translated back to the üöï string.

What I really want is the ü chars in the database, the ü chars to be echoed in the html, and the ü chars in the value of the input, being rendered to the appropriate characters. It seems impossible however to store the chars properly in the database.

I've been experiencing a lot of problems with this, pretty much for as long as I can remember. Who can give me a good heads up on this?

[lazzerous]

htmlentities() should do the trick for you

[Desdinova]

It does when echoing, but inserting it into the database changes it. I do use mysql_real_escape_string, but I take it that should not matter. Is the collation utf8_general_ci incorrect?

Or would it be PHPmyAdmin, which is showing it differently than it really is?

[NogDog]

If using UTF-8 as the character set, I would not use htmlentities() at all, as those are all valid UTF-8 characters. Instead, I would only use htmlspecialchars() and only use it when actually outputting to HTML, and that HTML document should be defined to use the UTF-8 character set so that there is no need to use the character entities.

[Desdinova]

ahh that makes sense.

I'll try and see how that works.