help me retrieve foreign(japanese) character from database

[shaan_cena]

Hi,

I'm developing a small application for my company, where in, the application needs to read a database file (MS ACCESS) which contains a single table.

the table structure is as follows,

ID - auto number
KANJI - text (this is a japanese symbol which has some meaning)
MEANING - text(this is the corresponding meaning in english)

and I'm using PHP to retrieve this data.
As of now, what I'm doing is, just the retrieval of rows of those two fields
using odbc_connect() and odbc_fetch_row()

and populating them on the screen.

the japanese symbols are getting displayed as QUESTION MARKS in firefox and some other junk display in other browsers

I have tried giving this header line
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
also charset = euc-jp
in HTML

and on the other hand, I tried this syntax too

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset="euc-jp"');
(or)
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8"');
in PHP

nothing worked out for me.
I think im missing the basics here.
May be the setting should be at database level
or
May be the encoding should be at SELECT query level

please help me out

Regards,
shaan_cena

[johanafm]

Find out what character encoding is used for the kanji column, then iconv it from that encoding to whatever you specify in the header call.

[shaan_cena]

I have used to below code, and its working with mysql.

$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die ('Error connecting to mysql');
mysql_select_db($dbname);
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$conn);

thank you