After living in Japan for six years and doing web programming for most of that time, you would think I would have this down by now. I used many combos – from Lasso/FileMaker to PHP/MSSQL and even PHP/PostgreSQL – but never used PHP/MySQL for any CJVK work. So I did some Googling and found four pages that claimed to have the answer:
- Use UTF-8 No BOM for each page. That is Byte-Order Mark, which does help in other languages like Cold Fusion, but not for me in PHP. NOPE!
- Use a PHP header tag:
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');and use a HTML meta tag:
NOPE!
- Use SET NAMES ‘utf8′; when instantiating your database object. NOPE!
- Change the column to utf8_general_ci and the collation to utf8_general_ci. NOPE!
I saw that PhpMyAdmin was displaying the characters correctly, so how were they doing it? I did a deep dive into the code and wound up at the mysql dbi connector where the following statements were set for EVERY query:
mysqliObj->query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'");
mysqliObj->query("SET collation_connection = 'utf8_general_ci'");
This, along with the column set to utf8_general_ci did the trick. The processing pages were set to Western (Mac OS Roman) which did not cause any problems inserting or displaying Japanese data.
This post is more for myself so I don’t ever forget how this is done. This can be black magic sometimes so I need some documentation.
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Spewed a new blog post: The Proper Way To Use UTF-8 (PHP/MySQL) http://bit.ly/ysLDv
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
You are my hero. I have been struggling with this for years. I have noticed that phpMyAdmin manages to display the data correctly
Spewed a new blog post: The Proper Way To Use UTF-8 (PHP/MySQL) http://bit.ly/ysLDv (via @clatko)
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
The collation is not needed btw, thats just for sorting
Good to know. I realized it worked without the collation, but included it for safe measure. Thanks.
Could you please show a full php code for using
mysqliObj->query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'");
mysqliObj->query("SET collation_connection = 'utf8_general_ci'");
and passing date from browser to mysql.
I am just learning this stuff and need to use multilingual data on a website wih mysql but after a couple days of research I can not seem to get it working. I could not find any help on msqliObj-> eiher.
Thanks, this would be very appreciated.
Apologies for getting back to you so late. I've been on a national tour for the past 16 days.
Here is a code snippet from a DB class I frequently use (the code below is getting garbled a bit):
public function read($query) { $this->mysqliObj_r->query('SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8''); $this->mysqliObj_r->query('SET collation_connection = 'utf8_general_ci''); if(!$resultObj = $this->mysqliObj_r->query($query)) { $error = 'Query Error: '.$this->mysqliObj_r->error."n".'SQL: '.$query; echo $error.''; } return $resultObj; }The mysliObj is an internal construct of my class. For more information, check out PHP’s docs on mysqli.
Good to know. I realized it worked without the collation, but included it for safe measure. Thanks.