sorted by: recent | see : popular

Content Tagged with character + encoding

Background Knowledge
The MySQL database v4.0.23 is using the default character set of “Latin1″. When the database was created I had no knowledge of character sets other wise it would have been “UTF-8″.
The web pages are using a character set of “UTF-8″.

Problem
Data being queried from a MySQL database that contains French accent characters will not render correctly in the browser even after applying PHP htmlentities().

Example code: $string = htmlentities($string , ENT_QUOTES, “UTF-8″);

Solution
The queried data from the database was inputted using the character set “ISO-8859-1″. I found this out by changing the browser’s character encoding to “Western ISO-8859-1″ and the French accent characters then rendered properly. With the use of PHP iconv() I was able to convert the data from “ISO-8859-1″ to “UTF-8″ character set and the French characters then rendered properly in the browser.

Example code: $string = iconv(”ISO-8859-1″,”UTF-8″,”$string”);

---

If you are unaware of what MySQL default character set being used, you can run this SQL command “show variables like “%character%” and check your MySQL configuration file. Refer to the MySQL manual for further details.

This chapter provides tutorial notes on character set and encoding in MySQL. Topics include defining text columns with specific character set encodings; encoding conversions performed by MySQL on SQL statements and result sets; fetching non-ASCII characters in UTF-8 encoding.

"In general, a representation provider SHOULD NOT specify the character encoding for XML data in protocol headers since the data is self-describing."

Somehow I didn't know about the 'xmlcharrefreplace' option for encoding Unicode strings.