Question

Hello I have a character encoding problem in my application and thought to ask for some help, because I couldn’t solve the problem even thought I was given some guidance so here goes:
My Ä and Ö characters are shown in the browser as: �

I will also post all what I have done so far trying to solve the problem:

1) Database: I have tried changing the collation of my tables, here are some info what SHOW TABLE STATUS gives for one of my tables:

Name = test_groups
Engine = InnoDB
Version = 10
Row_format = Compact
Collation = utf8_swedish_ci

Database character variables gives:

| character_set_client = utf8
| character_set_connection =
utf8
| character_set_database = latin1 (I
Wonder is this the cause?)
| character_set_filesystem
= binary
| character_set_results = utf8
| character_set_server = utf8
|
character_set_system = utf8

2) In apache httpd.conf I have:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

3) In my Zend-application application.ini:

resources.view.encoding = “UTF-8”

4) In my firefox 14.0.1 browser

edit->preferences->content->advanced->Default character encoding =
Unicode (UTF-8)

5) In my php code meta-tag:

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

Now here’s also few other interesting things: When I look at my page and change from firefox

View->Character encoding->Western (ISO-8859-1)

, the �-characters which came from the MySQL database turn out ok to öä-characters, but the öä-characters that come from my php-code turn into ät-characters.

Another thing when I check the encoding of the data coming from my MySQL-database with

mb_detect_encoding($DATA_FROM_MYSQL_DATABASE)

it outputs UTF-8!! Then lastly if I do in the code:

utf8_encode($DATA_FROM_MYSQL_DATABASE)

and output the result the problem disappears that is �-characters -> öä-characters. So what’s going on here x) All help appreciated

Answer 1

Are you sending SET NAMES utf8 in your PHP as the first query to MySQL ? That could be the cause if not.

SET NAMES indicates what character set the client will use to send SQL
statements to the server. Thus, SET NAMES ‘cp1251’ tells the server,
“future incoming messages from this client are in character set
cp1251.” It also specifies the character set that the server should
use for sending results back to the client. (For example, it indicates
what character set to use for column values if you use a SELECT
statement.)

SET NAMES utf8 in MySQL? has more detail about how and why.