Special characters

[CpHpristian]

I know that the problems with special characters have probably been discussed a thousand times.. but I couldn't find a satisfying solution yet.

 

Whenever readout stuff from my database, it doesn't display German special characters like ö and ä and so on. The php-echos just work fine.. what can I do?

[Daniel0]

You need to make sure the correct character set is used throughout the entire process. This means in the database, in PHP and in the HTML.

[CpHpristian]

I tried UTF8_general_ci for the collation and included <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> in my php-file.. but it doesn't work.

[CpHpristian]

What's interesting is that the special characters submitted by my HTML-forms look funny in the database but correct when readout. Hm. I need help here!!

[thebadbad]

You'll also need to set the character set/names for the MySQL connection, like below, before you insert or retrieve anything:

 

$connection = mysql_connect($db_host, $db_user, $db_pass) or die('Error connecting to database.');
mysql_select_db($db_name, $connection) or die('Error selecting database.');
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $connection);
mysql_query('SET CHARACTER SET utf8', $connection);

[CpHpristian]

It works! Thank you so much, thebadbad!

[CpHpristian]

OK. So it worked on my computer at home..

 

.. but now it's getting mysterious. I transfered the same files to the XAMPP machine at school.. and the special characters were all garbled again.

 

I tried everything - other than setting the browser to UTF-8 manually after every page click nothing helped.

 

Then I created a php-file at school, using the same header. And the special characters were just fine. Then I opened two editor windows.. both had the exact same content (!!) but different file names.. in one window the characters were garbled and the other one was fine. ??? At home I used dreamweaver and at school the editor.. but after copy/pasting the content should have been just the same.

 

I am so confused.

[gevans]

Could be something as stupid as browser cache.

[CpHpristian]

Both IE and Firefox are doing the same thing..  :-\

[Daniel0]

You need to make sure that the file itself is stored in UTF-8 (without BOM if your editor asks you).