Question

Ok this is a new one for me. Basically I have a table articles:

id: int auto increment title: varchar(200) description: varchar(1000) ctext: longtext chtml: longtext 

Now I do an insert into this table with mysql_query:

INSERT INTO articles (title, description, ctext, chtml) VALUES ('$title', '$description', '$text', '$html') 

All values have been passed through mysql_escape_string().

The text and html here are roughly 50k in size (so I can’t really post the fully query here).

Now, here’s the problem: the query works. A new row is inserted. However the ctext and chtml columns are empty. This is MySQL 5.0.51a and PHP 5.2.8. No errors are raised of any kind as far as I can tell.

Now I dumped the query out to a file in /tmp and ran it with:

mysql -u username -p dbname < /tmp/query 

Same thing.

I copy the query into Navicat and it… works.

So what on earth is going on?

Answer 1

Some random thoughts:

• Have you tried controlling the text length see if it only fails at one point?
• What kind of connection are you opening? Which driver?
• Have you checked the encoding of your connection? Some invalid characters might be sent in.
• Have you tried using parameters instead of mysql_escape_string?
• Have you tried executing directly from the same file from Navicat instead of using the copy-paste? Again, might be related to an invalid character that’s not passed through the copy-paste but was saved in the file.
• Just to cover the basics we so often forget, how do you verify that the data is not inserted? I mean, how to you visualize it? You could have a line break that hides the first lines from 2 out of 3 means of visualization. Just a long shot, but I’ve seen it happen.

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Addition: MySQL connections defaults to latin1, you need to use something like mysql_query('SET NAMES 'utf8'') to transfer unicode characters.