Question

I have a multi-byte text of 156 characters encoded in UTF-8 format and verified by PHP function mb_strlen($text, 'UTF-8') to be of 156 length. I was expecting to be able to store all of it with VARCHAR(156). But a good portion of the text got truncated.

This is my original text:

위키백과, 백과사전.

대수(λ -, lambda -)는 함. 1930년대 다. 함수 s(x, y) = xx + 입력 x 것이다. x ↦ x 와 y
↦ y 는 변수의 이름은. 또한 (x, y) ↦ xx + yy 와 (u, v) ↦ uu + v*v 는.123456

This is what I got in MySQL:

위키백과, 백과사전.

대수(λ -, lambda -)는 함. 1930년대 다. 함수 s(x, y) = x*x +
ìž…ë ¥ x 것ì´ë‹¤. x ↦ x 와 y ↦ y 는 변수ì

This is what is generated upon querying on my web page:

위키백과, 백과사전.

대수(λ -, lambda -)는 함. 1930년대 다. 함수 s(x, y) = x*x + 입력 x 것이다. x ↦ x 와 y
↦ y 는 변수�

There is a similar question on Stack Overflow, but it does not seem to address my question. Note that the table CHARSET=utf8 collation have been changed to UTF-8, General CI and column collation uses table default. I am using MySQL version 5.5.14 with system variables as shown:

+--------------------------+----------------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                                  |
+--------------------------+----------------------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                                   |
| character_set_connection | utf8                                   |
| character_set_database   | utf8                                   |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                                 |
| character_set_results    | utf8                                   |
| character_set_server     | utf8                                   |
| character_set_system     | utf8                                   |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/local/mysql/share/mysql/charsets/ |
| collation_connection     | utf8_general_ci                        |
| collation_database       | utf8_general_ci                        |
| collation_server         | utf8_general_ci                        |
+--------------------------+----------------------------------------+

UPDATE:

After running mysqli_query($cxn, "SET NAMES utf8") on PHP script as suggested by Homer6, it did take in the full 156 characters and renders as per my original text.

But now what is generated on my web page becomes:

????, ????. ??(? -, lambda -)? ?. 1930?? ?. ?? s(x, y) = xx + ?? x
???. x ? x ? y ? y ? ??? ???. ?? (x, y) ? xx + yy ? (u, v) ? uu +
v*v ?.123456

Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

Can you try quadrupling the size to 624? I think the size is in bytes, not characters. And UTF-8 can be between 1 and 4 bytes.

See http://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html

Also, are you setting

SET NAMES 'utf8';

before you run your query?

Or, for Korean, what happens if you set

mysql_query( 'SET NAMES euckr_korean_ci' );

before your query?

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/charset-asian-sets.html