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META value charset=UTF-8 prevents UTF-8 characters showing.

Answer 1

+1 A:

Firstly, PHP generally doesn't handle the Unicode character set or UTF-8 character encoding. With the exception of (careful use of) mb_... functions, it just treats strings as binary data.

Secondly, you need to tell the MySQL client library what character set / encoding you're working with. The 'SET NAMES' SQL command does the job, and different MySQL clients (mysql, mysqli etc..) provide access to it in different ways, e.g. http://www.php.net/manual/en/mysqli.set-charset.php

Your browser, and MySQL client, are probably both defaulting to latin1, and coincidentally matching. MySQL then knows to convert the latin1 binary data into UTF-8. When you set the browser charset/encoding to UTF-8, the MySQL client is interpreting that UTF-8 data as latin1, and incorrectly transcoding it.

So the solution is to set the MySQL client to a charset matching the input to PHP from the browser.

Note also that table collation isn't the same as table character set - collation refers to how strings are compared and sorted. Confusing stuff, hope this helps!

Paul Annesley 2010-08-26 12:36:04

Thanks very much. I've had a look and I think my problems (at least my UTF-8 related problems) are more basic that this. If I forget the DB for the time being and just put this little page on my server:<html><head></head><body>é</body></html>...All is well an é appears, but if I do this:<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body>é</body></html>...I get question marks.The same thing happens on both IE and FF.

Columbo 2010-08-26 14:59:32

sorry that didn't come out too well.

Columbo 2010-08-26 15:00:05

Perhaps your text editor is saving the file as a non-UTF-8 encoding?

Paul Annesley 2010-08-26 23:14:08

Thanks Paul, you were correct - when I UTF-8 encoded my code in notepad the simple script above worked. But, I still had the original database issue so I went back to your main post and it has solved the issue for me. I added the MySQL query SET NAMES utf8 from PHP (mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8");) before my main query therefore telling MySQL what character set to expect and it works. Therefore your third paragraph explains to me what is happening - I was wrongly assuming collation was all I needed to worry about. Thanks for the knowledge.

Columbo 2010-08-27 08:12:53

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META value charset=UTF-8 prevents UTF-8 characters showing.

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