Question

I am trying to create some pages using PHP / MySQL.

My database table is set to utf8_general_ci and so are the table columns. If I use phpmyadmin and manually insert a page I can type all the € I want and they will be inserted as €. I can display this perfectly too.

However when I am trying to insert a page using mysqli the € will be converted to €

I am not doing any conversions of any kind. If I echo the page column fiels just before I am about to insert the page it still displays the € correctly.

The code:

$connection = new mysqli('localhost', 'root', '', 'some_db');

$query  = 'INSERT INTO page (ID, title, content) VALUES (?, ?, ?)';
$params = array('iss', 'NULL', 'test title', '€ some content');

$stmt = $connection->prepare($query);

call_user_func_array(array($stmt, 'bind_param'), by_ref($params));

$stmt->execute();

The by_ref function only makes a reference, nothing else. All works fine except it gives me a headache when it doesn’t insert € correctly. Maybe it is not the bind_param, but something else. I would however like to know the answer!

Update:

Thanks to Digital Precision I figured out I would have to make sure the connection was going to use ‘utf8’. However I only need to set it when using INSERT or UPDATE as SELECT did give me results back in utf8. Hope this helps someone

Answer 1

PHPMyAdmin may be explicitly setting the connection charset to UTF-8 which is why it may work through the admin interface and not through your script. Check out mysqli::set_charset for more detailed info.

$connection->set_charset('utf8');

Edit

Try taking out the call_user_function:

$connection = new mysqli('localhost', 'root', '', 'some_db');

$query  = 'INSERT INTO page (ID, title, content) VALUES (?, ?, ?)';
//$params = array('iss', 'NULL', 'test title', '€ some content');

$stmt = $connection->prepare($query);

// Replace this
//call_user_func_array(array($stmt, 'bind_param'), by_ref($params));

// With this
$stmt->bind_param('iss', 'NULL', 'test title', '€ some content'); 

$stmt->execute();