Question

I have had no end of problems trying to do what I thought would be relatively simple:

I need to have a form which can accept user input text in a mix of English an other languages, some multi-byte (ie Japanese, Korean, etc), and this gets processed by php and is stored (safely, avoiding SQL injection) in a mysql database. It also needs to be accessed from the database, processed, and used on-screen.

I have it set up fine for Latin chars but when I add a mix of Latin andmulti-byte chars it turns garbled.

I have tried to do my homework but just am banging my head against a wall now.

Magic quotes is off, I have tried using utf8_encode/decode, htmlentities, addslashes/stripslashes, and (in mysql) both “utf8_general_ci” and “utf8_unicode_ci” for the field in the table.

Part of the problem is that there are so many places where I could be messing it up that I’m not sure where to begin solving the problem.

Thanks very much for any and all help with this. Ideally, if someone has working php code examples and/or knows the right mysql table format, that would be fantastic.

Answer 1

I don’t think you have any practical alternatives to UTF-8. You’re going to have to track down where the encoding and/or decoding breaks. Start by checking whether you can round-trip multi-language text to the data base from the mysql command line, or perhaps through phpmyadmin. Track down and eliminate problems at that level. Then move out one more level by simulating input to your php and examining the output, again dealing with any problems. Finally add browsers into the mix.