Question

I have this code in drupal 6 to retrieve arabic values from Oracle databse:

           <?php
            session_start();
            $conn=oci_connect('localhost','pass','IP....');
            $stid=oci_parse($conn,"select arabic_name from arabic_names_table");
            oci_execute($stid);
            if($row-oci_fetch_array($stid,OCI_ASSOC+OCI_RETURNS_NULLS))
                {
                 $name_ar=$row['arabic_name'];
                 }
           ?>

When values are retrieved from the DB or inserted to the DB they appears like this ???

Please note:

• My Oracle database reads normal Arabic characters. From PL/SQL I can insert arabic values
• I have installed the mbstring
• I have the utf-8 encoding enabled.

How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

From the oracle database, when you try to fetch data, normally you will get the character encoding will be the encoding type of the client installed in the system (the machine that you installed the php). This encoding will be the charset of the windows registry for the oracle client. (see HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\KEY_OraClient11g_home1), and the key is NLS_LANG. If you search the value of the above key, you will get something like ARABIC_UNITED ARAB EMIRATES.AR8MSWIN1256. Please note that the encoding type is AR8MSWIN1256. In the character map array this is mapped to windows-1256 ( windows-1256 => AR8MSWIN1256 ).

See this link http://websvn.projects.ez.no/wsvn/ezoracle/?op=comp&compare%5B%5D=%2Fstable@385&compare%5B%5D=%2Fstable@386.

That is, after you fetch the data from the database the char encoding will be windows-1256. Now if your web page is using utf-8 charset, you need to convert the string to utf-8. For this you can use iconv().

$win1256 = iconv('windows-1256', 'utf-8', $my_string); //$my_string -> windows-1256    
echo $win1256; // Results the utf-8 format .

If you are still facing problem you check the charset in the page, it must be utf-8.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

I think this will solve your problem.