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Asked: 2026-05-25T16:08:10+00:00

Cannot find the reason why I am unable to store in a MySQL database

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Cannot find the reason why I am unable to store in a MySQL database characters like ţ, î, ş.

My table definition is:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `gen_admin_words_translated` (
  `id` int(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `word_id` int(10) NOT NULL,
  `value` text COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci,
  `lang_id` int(2) NOT NULL,
  `needUpd` int(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci AUTO_INCREMENT=2689 ;

The connection to the database is done with the following script:

$charset = "UTF8";
$link = mysql_connect($host, $user, $pass);
if(!$link){
    die("Unable to connect to database server.");
}
mysql_selectdb($database);
if(function_exists("mysql_set_charset")){
    mysql_set_charset($charset, $link);
}else{
    mysql_query("SET NAMES $charset");   
}

I have on the head part of the page:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

and the script is:

$text = 'ţ, î, ş';
mysql_query("insert into gen_admin_words_translated (word_id, lang_id, value, needUpd) values (1, 1, '$text', 1)");

All I get in the end in the table is:

SELECT * FROM  `gen_admin_words_translated` 

id   word_id value lang_id needUpd
5166 1034    ?,    1       1
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Expanding my comments into an answer:

    It seems that you have set up things correctly, and are only stuck on inserting a string literal to the database. To do that successfully you must also ensure that your text encoding for the saved PHP script is also UTF-8.

    Most decent editors will let you know which encoding you are currently working with and can also save as (i.e. convert between) different encodings (even Notepad does this today). However, as a quick check you can add the character € to your file somewhere and save it. If the file size changes by 1 or 2 bytes instead of 3, you are not on UTF-8 and you need to convert the file to that encoding.

    Other than that, when receiving text as input from the browser your code should handle it just fine.

    Note: While using a <meta> tag to set the encoding for your page should be sufficient, it’s better if you do this with an HTTP header from PHP like this:

    header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
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