I have mysql 5 client and server installed on my ubuntu linux system. I have just inserted the first chapter of genesis into the database using SQL in phpmyadmin. Data are shown correctly with phpmyadmin, but when I retrieve the data with PHP data appear like ????? in the webpage. Althought I have set the charset to windows-1256 using this PHP script: [code] <?php mysql_connect("localhost","root","") or die ("error"); mysql_select_db("ecacsyr") or die ("error"); header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=windows-1256'); header('Content-Language: ar'); ?> <html dir="rtl"> <head> </head> <body> <?php $sql = "select * from `arabicbible`"; $result = mysql_query($sql); echo "الكتاب المقدس<br><br>سفر التكوين<br><br>الاصحاح الأول<br><br>"; while ($record = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) { echo "<b>".$record['nid']." ".$record['verse']."</b><br>"; } ?> </body> </html> [/code] And this is how it displays my data: [img src=\"http://nourelalam.org/Isos/bible.png\" border=\"0\" alt=\"IPB Image\" /] As you can see, data appear as ???? while other characters written in HTML they appear in arabic as they should. So I have set the collation to cp1256_general_ci for the database, the table and the verse field which contains the arabic text. Have a look at my phpmyadmin: [img src=\"http://nourelalam.org/Isos/genesis.phpmyadmin.png\" border=\"0\" alt=\"IPB Image\" /] Please help! I've never faced any problem with the collations before untill I upgraded to mysql5! before I never had to set any collation or work with anything related to charset in mysql ... phpmyadmin of my web host server doesn't have this problem at all! ... but I don't know why phpmyadmin gives this option on my localhost ... This is bugging me! and the strange thing is that when I removed mysql 5 completely from my system and reinstalled apache2 with the previous version of mysql and php4 and phpmyadmin and the problem remained! I don't really understand the mechanism of these web applications .. I just know php programming! So please somebody help!