Comments on: Corrupted UTF-8 characters with PHP and MySQL

By: Jimmie

Jimmie — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 08:58:58 +0000

This is an issue that is occurring all over the net. I read stories/articles all the time and it is very difficult to read when you’re seeing â€™ everywhere – for example “Whatâ€™s” instead of “What’s” A classic example of this can be found on twitter.com Go to http://www.twitter.com and note where it says “What’s happening?” Now click in the edit box to change your status. As soon as you click, you will now notice the above text reads “Whatâ€™s happening?” It’s not just the apostrophe either, as you can see in this line copied from another site. â€œHey Jess, you wanna do something? Iâ€™m really bored.â€ “Hey Jess, you wanna do something? I’m really bored.” I use Opera myself, but even when I viewed the same page in IE it still came up the same. It’s not something I recall being a problem in the past. So why now? And what can someone from my end do about it? From what I can gather, you all are talking about rectifying the issue during the construction of the site. Is there something I can do as a viewer to counteract it? Is there a line of code I can add to my browser config or an addon I can download or such that will convert â€™ back to apostrophes? Because, to be quite honest, it’s giving me the SH$@S!!

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:47:33 +0000

Thanks for mentioning this following super important comment regarding init-connect=’SET NAMES utf8′: “The catch is the commands won’t be executed for a user with SUPER privileges, so if you’re lazy and using ‘root’ to connect to your database, it won’t work.”

By: Ümläüte ‘r’ üs at shoppero Blog

Ümläüte ‘r’ üs at shoppero Blog — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 04:22:13 +0000

[...] erklärt das Problem [...]

By: Zaw Htet Wai

Zaw Htet Wai — Mon, 28 May 2007 07:03:30 +0000

I was also stucking in this utf-8 problem. The server's MySQL version is 4.0.25 (which does not support utf-8) and PHP is 4. Although I can save the German chars in DB correctly, when I display in HTML, they appear in incorrect format. I tried with a lot of PHP built-in string functions (substrreplace, strpos, utf8decode, mbconvertencoding("", 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES')) and encode, decode methods but couldn't be helpful. When I chek the View-> Source, all chars are correct in Notepad, but not in HTML. So far the best solution for me is to replace the German chars with related HTML numerical code (eg. ä => ä) before you insert the data to DB. After that when u retrieve the data and display them to browser, no need to do anything. Everything will be in correct format.

By: Nils

Nils — Sat, 19 May 2007 21:28:22 +0000

You can also set charactersetclient to utf8 in my.cnf.

By: Lars Strojny

Lars Strojny — Sat, 05 May 2007 11:54:52 +0000

btw: http://usrportage.de/archives/656-What-to-do.html