PHP MySQL insert dropping data

Question

Ok this is a new one for me. Basically I have a table articles:

id: int auto increment
title: varchar(200)
description: varchar(1000)
ctext: longtext
chtml: longtext

Now I do an insert into this table with mysql_query:

INSERT INTO articles
(title, description, ctext, chtml)
VALUES
('$title', '$description', '$text', '$html')

All values have been passed through mysql_escape_string().

The text and html here are roughly 50k in size (so I can't really post the fully query here).

Now, here's the problem: the query works. A new row is inserted. However the ctext and chtml columns are empty. This is MySQL 5.0.51a and PHP 5.2.8. No errors are raised of any kind as far as I can tell.

Now I dumped the query out to a file in /tmp and ran it with:

mysql -u username -p dbname < /tmp/query

Same thing.

I copy the query into Navicat and it... works.

So what on earth is going on?

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this matters, but mysql_escape_string is deprecated and replaced by mysql_real_escape_string

Have you tried it with smaller text?

Answer 2

Some random thoughts:

• Have you tried controlling the text length see if it only fails at one point?
• What kind of connection are you opening? Which driver?
• Have you checked the encoding of your connection? Some invalid characters might be sent in.
• Have you tried using parameters instead of mysql_escape_string?
• Have you tried executing directly from the same file from Navicat instead of using the copy-paste? Again, might be related to an invalid character that's not passed through the copy-paste but was saved in the file.
• Just to cover the basics we so often forget, how do you verify that the data is not inserted? I mean, how to you visualize it? You could have a line break that hides the first lines from 2 out of 3 means of visualization. Just a long shot, but I've seen it happen.

---

Addition: MySQL connections defaults to latin1, you need to use something like mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'") to transfer unicode characters.