Member Avatar for Pado

Every once in a while I run into this problem and finally decided to consult the experts. :) I insert foreign characters (Czech letters) into my MySQL database and see them there. They look fine. But when I try to retrieve them using PHP they come out with question marks on my website. Can someone tell me how to fix this? I use the charset utf-8 on the website (the characters on my website are all Czech) and I tried changing the Collation of the columns to different charsets. Such as utf-czech_ci or utf-general_ci and they still come out with question marks. I'm not sure if this is a MySQL problem or a PHP problem or an HTML problem, but I'm hoping someone else might know. Thanks.

  • 4 Contributors
  • 4 Replies
  • 258 Views
  • 18 Hours Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by Pado
Member Avatar for Simon Tite

Sounds to me like an HTML problem, if you can see the characters correctly in, say, phpadmin, that would mean that the database is storing and retrieving them correctly.

Your HTML code has to tell the browser which character set it is using, a line in the <head> section such as this

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8" />

might help. (the xhtml+xml bit may not be applicable to your site, you may have to investigate the alternatives).

Of course, if your site is already correctly displaying utf-8 characters (characters which did not come from mySql), then probably the html is not at fault...

Edited by Simon Tite because: afterthought
Member Avatar for aquilax

Check if executing:

SET names utf8

after connecting to the database will fix the problem.

Member Avatar for d5e5

Check if executing:

SET names utf8

after connecting to the database will fix the problem.

Yes. Apparently this is an MySQL bug, according to this link: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=10812

Member Avatar for Pado

Yes. Apparently this is an MySQL bug, according to this link: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=10812

Thank you all. The "SET NAMES 'UTF8'" call immediately before my SELECT call worked like a charm. :icon_smile: Thank you, again. I've been struggling with this for ages.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.