Converting German Characters

kbc1

Hi All

I store the names of places in a table and create a firendly URL from them as such:

Name: Quality Hotel
URL: quality-hotel

When a user clicks to view the details of the hotel, i use the URL to pull the record from the database. This works fine up until recent when a hotel name was as follows:

3* Östersund Race Hotel

The URL saved in my database actually comes out as this:

3*-Ã–stersund-race-hotel

and the data is not being found when I try to call it in my database query.

What is the best way to convert any of these special characters to something that a URL can interpet?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

DaveRandom

The charset of your DB is not the same as the charset PHP is using.

I have no idea which is which, without picking through a load of charset tables to find the ones where those two characters clash, but that is (I am 99% sure) what the problem is.

If you're using MySQL with the default charset (latin-1), it has an annoying habit of collating everything in latin-1_swedish_ci unless you explicitly tell it otherwise, and PHP is (probably) using UTF-8 - it depends on how the string was imported into your script, as PHP treats EVERYTHING as binary data.