Question

I’m re-designing a Web site and I have a problem with the existing data base:
The database collate is set to utf8_unicode_ci and in the table row I’m calling the collate seems to be set to latin1_swedish_ci the characters store in it are Japanese (but even in phpmyadmin) you see other characters (I guess because of the latin1_swedish_ci).

When I print the result from the query I get a bunch of ??? now using

    mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8');
 mysql_set_charset('utf8',$conn); 

Will output 2009â€N10ŒŽÂ†2009?N10???2009â€N11ŒŽÂ†2009?N11???

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Hi all thanks for your reply’s this is what happened, I couldn’t really change anything in the DB since there’s another version of the site that still uses that DB and will be up. So the solution I found was the following:

Case scenario:
The DB is set to use UTF8 -> (utf8_general_ci) but the field (at least the one’s I needed where set to latin1_swedish_ci.

Solution:
After mysql_connect I put the following:

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'Shift_JIS'",$conn);
mysql_set_charset('Shift_JIS',$conn); 

Then in the PHP file:

$titleJP = $row['titleJP'];
$titleJP = mb_convert_encoding($titleJP, "UTF-8", mb_detect_encoding($titleJP,"Shift_JIS,JIS,SJIS,eucjp-win"));

Now that worked perfectly the characters are displayed in correct Japanese.
I tried every other solution I could think of with no luck (utf-8_decode/encode php functions, etc.. etc..)