Question

I’m trying to make a c# project that reads from a MySQL database.

The data are inserted from a php page with utf-8 encoding. Both page and data is utf-8.

The data is self is greek words like “Λεπτομέρεια 3”.

When fetching the data it looks like “ΛεπτομέÏεια 3”.

I have set ‘charset=utf8’ in the connection string and also tried with ‘set session character_set_results=latin1;’ query.

When doing the same with mysql (linux), MySQL Workbench, MySQL native connector for OpenOffice with OpenOffice Base, the data are displayed correctly.

I’m I doing something wrong or what else can I do?

Running the query ‘SELECT value, HEX(value), LENGTH(value), CHAR_LENGTH(value) FROM call_attribute;’ from inside my program.
It returns :

Value:
ΛεπτομέÏεια 3

HEX(value) :
C38EE280BAC38EC2B5C38FE282ACC38FE2809EC38EC2BFC38EC2BCC38EC2ADC38FC281C38EC2B5C38EC2B9C38EC2B12033

LENGTH(value) :
49

CHAR_LENGTH(value) :
24

Any ideas???

Answer 1

You state that the first character of your data is capital lambda, Λ.

The UTF-8 represenation of this character is 0xCE 0x9B, whereas the HEX() value starts with C38E, which is indeed capital I with circumflex, as displayed in your question.

So I guess the original bug was not in the PHP configuration, and your impression that “data are displayed correctly” was wrong and due to an encoding problem.

Also note that the Greek alphabet only requires Latin-7, rather than Latin-1, when storing Greek data as single-byte characters rather than in Unicode.

Most likely, you have an encoding problem here, meaning different applications interpret the binary data as different character sets or encodings. (But lacking PHP and MySQL knowledge, I cannot really help you how to configure correctly).