Member Avatar for Venom Rush

I have a database that needs to hold names of people from all around the world. Some names have special characters in them such as é and ¢

Is there a character set I can use that will accept any character no matter what language it is (with the exception of non-English looking characters like chinese characters for instance)

Edited by Venom Rush because: n/a
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Member Avatar for Venom Rush

Am I the first person in MySQL's entire life to need this sort of thing? o.O
Surely someone before me has run into this problem. I thought utf8_unicode_ci would do the trick or utf8_general_ci but neither of them work.

There must be some encoding set that I can use to accept worldwide characters...

Member Avatar for jbennet

Should be possible, because this site supports russian-type characters, and runs on mysql?.

Member Avatar for almostbob

my db is simple, numeric data only, but i went here, MYSQL Charsets to find out how to display other character sets, it was complicated, thats when I decided to set numeric tables (chickened out)

Member Avatar for Atli

Is there a character set I can use that will accept any character no matter what language it is (with the exception of non-English looking characters like chinese characters for instance)

UTF-8 (utf8_general_ci) should work fine for that. Even for the Chinese characters.

I've created blog software in the past, using UTF-8, that I used to post content in multiple languages, including: English, Icelandic, Russian, Japanese. All of them worked perfectly.

If UTF-8 didn't work for you, odds are that the problem was not with MySQL itself, but rather your method of populating/retrieving the data from MySQL.

commented: Thanks for your help ;) +3
Member Avatar for Venom Rush

Hi guys

Thanks for all the input. My suspicions lie with the hosting company. We've had numerous issues before and the problem was always something that they hadn't setup correctly.

I'm going to test this on another database.

Member Avatar for Venom Rush

Ok, so it seems it's the server setup. I've tested the same pages on one of our own servers and it's working fine with special characters.

Thanks again to all of you that posted.

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