ansaurus

Question

Answer 1

+1 A:

E8 is greater than the maximum usable character 7F in a one-byte UTF8 character: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

It seems your connection is not set to UTF8 but some other 8 bit encoding like ISO Latin. If you set the database to UTF8 you only change the character set the database uses internally, connections may be on a different default value (latin1 for older MySQL versions) so you should try to send an initial SET CHARACTER SET utf-8 after connecting to the database. If you have access to my.cnf you can also set the correct default value there, but keep in mind that changing the default may break any other sites/apps running on the same host.

Energiequant 2010-04-11 01:07:55

Thanks, problem was overcome using php's utf8_encode() function.

Danten 2010-04-11 01:20:01

`SET CHARACTER SET` is not the right command for this (see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1566602/is-set-character-set-utf8-necessary), and it should be `utf8`, not `utf-8`. @Danten, you should not need to use `utf8_encode()` if you've set everything up correctly.

mercator 2010-04-11 01:33:30

For some reason, SET NAMES never worked the way we needed it on some of our client's servers (on some servers it seemed to have no effect at all). Naming of character sets unfortunately differs depending on the distribution you use. utf-8 was available on all servers we deployed to while utf8 was sometimes unknown. However, since we have to support some strangely hosted webspaces, some of them may have had a wrong setup. In any case, at least the character set (and maybe the command itself) should best be kept in a config file if changes have to be made quickly on deployment.

Energiequant 2010-04-11 10:18:49

Answer 2

+1 A:

Your database might be set to UTF-8, but the database connection also needs to be set to UTF-8. You should do that with a SET NAMES utf8 statement. You can use the driver_options in PDO to have it execute that as soon as you connect:

$handle = new PDO("mysql:host=localhost;dbname=dbname",
    'username', 'password', 
    array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8"));

Have a look at the following two links for more detailed information about making sure your entire site uses UTF-8 appropriately:

mercator 2010-04-11 01:23:05

For future reference, I did this. The problem was multi-byte strings.

Danten 2010-04-11 01:30:44

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

UTF-8 Database Problem

related questions