Chinese Characters

kbc1

Hi all

I have a requirement to allow an existing website to support Chinese content.

The website is running PHP and MySQL database with a simple admin system which allows the customer to update page content, however this needs to be expanded to allow colleagues in China to log in and update their own pages.

I have tried adding the Chinese content directly into the mysql database and refreshing the webpage that retrieves it, but the Chinese content comes up as questions marks only.

I am using utf-8 encoding.

What other things would I need to do in order to get Chinese content to display in the browser correctly?

Thanks for reading.
kbc

jeremyphphaven

make sure your collation is utf8_general_ci. And also set your default charset to utf-8

sql - alter table TABLENAME default charset 'utf8'

that will update your table character set to utf8 - You may also have to re-store the data in the table before you can read it correctly.

try that, store some new chinese in the table, then try and read it.

--edit-- oh and if you think it's outputting correctly but not displaying correctly in the browser... browsers handle languages differently. google chrome is a great one to test with because is has all major language support and auto-translate feature to help check your work (although auto-translate is far from perfect). Firefox displays chinese fine I think also. Wouldn't trust IE for testing, but it should display fine in IE once you're finished also

sneakyimp

You need to do things at several places
1) Declare your charset in your HTML page's header.

	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

2) You should send a [man]header[/man] that indicates your page is UTF-8:

   header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

3) Your database tables need to be encoded as utf-8
4) You need your php page to connect using charset utf8:

if (!$mysqli->set_charset("utf8")) {
    printf("Error loading character set utf8: &#37;s\n", $mysqli->error);
} else {
    printf("Current character set: %s\n", $mysqli->character_set_name());
}

5) You should be using the [man]mbstring[/man] functions to parse your strings.

There could be more. This page looks really helpful.