€ and MySQL

safra

Hi,

The € is stored in MySQL as ?. The charset of the column is utf-8. Anyone knows what could go wrong here?

Thanks!

johanafm

The data sent to MySQL is not utf-8. Either set the relevant MySQL settings for automatic encoding conversions, or better yet, use utf-8 all the way.

safra

thanks!

I converted the character set of the whole table to utf8 and now the € character is stored correctly. However when displaying the data back in an html form textarea it appears as �. Well that is actually what it looks like here after copy pasting. In the form textarea it appears as a white square with black border. The html content charset is set to charset=utf-8 and adding accept-charset="utf-8" to the form tag doesn't help. How can this be fixed?

johanafm

Same answer as above. UTF-8 all the way, or properly translating between different charsets as needed.

What are the settings for your database connection regarding the 3 things related to by SET names?
How do you set the "html content charset"? Explicit header, old meta, new meta, mix?

safra

It is kinda hard to put your comments into code that covers everything you wrote but I belief you guided me in the right direction:

mysql_set_charset('utf8');

I was doing all of this on a remote server where the issue occurs. This server still runs PHP 4 so I cannot test it. But it does the trick on my local server so I guess this is what was missing...?

johanafm

Glad you solved it, but since PHP 4 was discontinued over 3 years ago, I'd definitely put the time into getting PHP 5.4 up and running (or at the very least the latest 5.3) instead. Why put time and effort into writing code for PHP 5 only to have to add more time to also make it work in PHP 4?

safra

I know, we have more issues with this. They have been announcing an upgrade for almost a year now, nothing happens... we are looking for a new hosting company.

Thanks a lot for your help!