Zend DB and encoding

Question

Hi guys

I have just encountered something rather strange, I use the Zend Framework 1.10 with the Zend_Db_Table module to read some data from a databse. The database itself, the table and the fields in question all have their collation set to "utf8_general_ci" and all special chars appear correctly formatted in the DB when checked with phpMyAdmin. Also, saving with Zend_Db_Table works just fine, yet when I read the data and just echo it to my browser it is returned as ISO-8859-1, not as UTF8. I noticed the same thing when trying to use json_encode (which only works with UTF8 strings as input) on a value returned from the DB.

How can I set that Zend_Db_Table/Zend_Db_Row should always work with UTF8 and return me an UTF8 value? I have not set anything regarding encoding in my app yet.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Answer 1

Ok just found the solution, try to do this:

$db = Zend_Db::factory($config->database); // Setting up the DB
$db->query("SET NAMES 'utf8';");           // That's the magic line I was missing

Hope this helps somebody else at some point :)

Answer 2

Also you can just put "charset" key with desired value into config and DB-driver will execute an appropriate query (depending on DBMS used). It seems to be that currently (version 1.10.5) almost all drivers support that.

Answer 3

resources.db.params.charset = utf8

like robertbasic said.