htmlentities() - question about its use

[kbc1]

Hi all

I have my database which is setup as utf-8 encoded. My web pages are charset=utf-8. My website offers multi-language pages of content.

Via my CMS, I have saved the following category name (for example):

Wärme

Now, when I view this string in the database, it appears exactly as above, no characters have been converted in any way.

So when I pull out the data from my database I use the following:

$string 	= htmlentities($row['name'], ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
echo $string;

Now my understanding (of htmlentities) is that this should be converted and displayed in the browser correctly, however the string doesn't appear at all when I loop through the categories table. All category names that have no special characters appear fine but this one is just omitted completely.

Any ideas?

Am I applying the htmlentities() function correcly when outputting my categories?

So confused...

[bradgrafelman]

Did you read the manual page for [man]htmlentities/man? It does describe a case where the function will return an empty string if there is a problem.

You say you use UTF-8 in your database... but did you call the appropriate function(s) after connecting to the database (or before, if you're using PDO) to set the encoding of your connection to UTF-8 as well? It's possible that the default value is something else. You didn't say which DBMS you're using, but here is a page from the MySQL manual that talks about connection encoding. To accomplish what that page talks about, you'd use a PHP function like [man]mysqli_set_charset/man (if using the MySQLi extension).

[kbc1]

Hi bradgrafelman

I have used the following code on both my website and CMS in the DBCONN script before any HTML is output:

	$dblink = mysqli_connect(DBHOST, DBUSER, DBPASS, DBNAME);

/* check connection */
if (mysqli_connect_errno()) {
	printf("Connect failed: %s\n", mysqli_connect_error());
	exit();
}

$q = "SET character_set_results = 'utf8', character_set_client = 'utf8', character_set_connection = 'utf8', character_set_database = 'utf8', character_set_server = 'utf8'";
$r = mysqli_query($dblink,$q);

if (!mysqli_set_charset($dblink, "utf8")) {
	printf("Error loading character set utf8: %s\n", mysqli_error($dblink));
} else {
	printf("Current character set: %s\n", mysqli_character_set_name($dblink));
}

My script says its UTF8.

I am at a complete loss as how to fix this. I can physically pull up the record by passing an ID across the URL in my CMS to display the record and when I do I can save the record without any problems, still saving the string "Wärme" to the database. But when I view the list page of records saved in my table, that particular record will not show.

Any other ideas as to what could be the issue?

So frustrating!

Thanks in advance.