Korean Website - Question/Help

kbc1

Hi all

I am replicating a UK based website to be traslated into Korean and it will also be hosted in Korea.

I have a mySQL database setup with UTF-8 encoding and I have copied my korean content into it.

For my site code, I have looked around for hints and tips and eventually settled on the following meta data at the top of my site:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="ko">
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="ko">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=euc-kr">

Now when I run my homepage and display my menu items (which are translated into Korean and stored in my database) the browser displays question mark characters instead of the Korean content.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get the Korean content to display?

Many thanks for reading.

Kris

kbc1

Just to add, I can hard code the Korean content directly into the body and it displays fine in the browser, its only when I pull the data from the database does the question mark characters appear!

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Derokorian

What's the charset / collation of the database tables and columns?

bradgrafelman

If your data is stored as UTF-8, why are you outputting the incorrect character set in your HTML header? Speaking of that header... where's the <head> element? Are you sure your HTML is even valid markup?

Did you execute a SET NAMES command when connecting to MySQL? (See this page in the MySQL manual for info on what that command does.)

kbc1

The MySQL database is currently set to UTF-8.

My first question would be is this OK to continue or should it be changed to something else?

Secondly, if UTF-8 is OK, would the META data be setup as:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="ko">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="ko">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

I am kind of shooting in the dark here to be honest.

bradgrafelman - I used "SET NAMES utf8;" and the questions marks changed to other symbols but none of which match the content stored in my database.

I am sure there is a simple solution and its just getting th ecombination of database and meta tags correct maybe?

If someone could correct the META tag data above and maybe confirm what the encoding of the database should be I will take it from their!

Thanks for helping and reading.

Derokorian

Here's the meta tag I use:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

You might also consider issuing a charset header before any output like this:

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

Ashley_Sheridan

kbc1, what about what Derokorian mentioned, "What's the charset / collation of the database tables and columns?"

kbc1

The database is set as UTF-8.

I have overnight managed to get the webpage pulling out the correct Korean content using the following:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="ko">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="ko">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

I also used this:

$qry = "SET character_set_results=utf8";
$res = mysql_query($qry);

However, I am now at the admin system end which allows the user to store the data and when I save the Korean characters they save as a random collection of symbols and NOT the Korean characters.

Is there any specific function I need to use to get the Korean data to store into the MyQL database correctly?

For information, I can copy and paste the Korean content into the database directly and it saves fine.

Many Thanks

bradgrafelman

In the admin system, do you have the character set defined on all HTML pages (such as with a <meta> tag, a Content-Type header, or both)? Likewise, do you issue a 'SET NAMES' SQL command before anything else?