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Asked: 2026-05-16T00:16:28+00:00

I’m making a KSSN (Korean ID Number) checker in PHP using a MySQL database.

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I’m making a KSSN (Korean ID Number) checker in PHP using a MySQL database.
I check if it is working by using a file_get_contents call to an external site.

The problem is that the requests (with Hangul/Korean characters in them) are using the wrong charset.
When I echo the string, the Korean characters just get replaced by question marks.

How can I make it to use Korean? Should I change anything in the database too?
What should be the charset?

PHP Source and SQL Dump: http://www.multiupload.com/RJ93RASZ31

NOTE: I’m using Apache (HTML), not CLI.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You need to:

    1. tell the browser what encoding you wish to receive in the form submission, by setting Content-Type by header or <meta> as in aviv’s answer.

    2. tell the database what encoding you’re sending it bytes in, using mysql_set_charset().

    Currently you are using EUC-KR in the database so presumably you want to use that encoding in both the above points. In this century I would suggest instead using UTF-8 throughout for all web apps/databases, as the East Asian multibyte encodings are an anachronistic unpleasantness. (With potential security implications, as if mysql_real_escape_string doesn’t know the correct encoding, a multibyte sequence containing ' or \ can sneak through an SQL injection.)

    However, if enpang.com are using EUC-KR for the encoding of the Name URL parameter you would need either to stick with EUC-KR, or to transcode the name value from UTF-8 to EUC-KR for that purpose using iconv(). (It’s not clear to me what encoding enpang.com are using for URL parameters to their name check service; I always get the same results anyway.)

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