Android, mysql, and rendering non Latin Characters as well as Latin?

Question

Are these squares a representation of chinese characters being turned into unicode?

EDIT:[Here I entered the squares with numbers inside them into the post but they didn't render]

I'd like to either turn this back into the original characters when displayed in android (or to enable mysql to just store them as chinese characters not in unicode???)

BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is, "UTF-8"), 8);

While debugging it shows the strings value as "\u001a\u001a\u001a\u001a"

 byte[] bytes = chinesestringfromdatabase.getBytes();

turns it into "[26, 26, 26, 26]"

String fresh = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");

and then this turns it back into EDIT:[Here I entered the squares with numbers inside them into the post but they didn't render]

My phone can display chinese text.

MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)

While typing my question I realize that perhaps I have the wrong charset all together. I'm lost as to whether or not my issue will even be anything coding related or if it is just related to a setting or if php cannot handle the character set??

I'd like to store and render multiple language character sets that could contain a mixture of languages.

Answer 1

Here I entered the squares with numbers inside them into the post but they didn't render

With "squares with numbers inside", do you mean the same as those which you also see for some exotic languages somewhere at the bottom of the Wikipedia homepage, while browsing with Firefox browser? (in all other browsers -MSIE, Chrome, Safari, etc- you would only see nothing-saying empty squares).

If true, then it simply means that there are no glyphs available for those characters in the font which the webbrowser/viewer is been instructed to use.

I'd like to store and render multiple language character sets that could contain a mixture of languages.

Use UTF-8 all the way. Only keep in mind that MySQL only supports the BMP panel of Unicode (max 3 bytes per character), not the other panels (4 bytes per character). So the SMP panel (which contains "special" CJK characters) is out of range for MySQL.

References

• PHP UTF-8 cheatsheet
• Unicode - How to get characters right? (for Java web developers)
• MySQL reference - Unicode support