Escape European Characters

[ayok]

Hi,

 

I'm trying to insert european characters to mysql such as ë, é, etc. However I've got strange character in my database. How can I encode this chars into html like &euml, or &eacute? I used code like

 

echo str_replace("ë","ë",$txt);

But it's not working.

 

Would anyone help?

 

thank you,

ayok

[Zyx]

And have you set the encoding properly? Just give UTF-8 encoding to:

 

1. MySQL connection:

 

SET NAMES 'utf8';

 

2. MySQL columns (collations), tables and database.

3. Set the website charset:

 

header('Content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8');

 

Or maybe you HAVE set UTF-8 in the database, but you haven't for the rest of the PHP script. Anyway, I think the problem comes from the fact that you have forgotten or do not understand the concept of character encodings.

 

echo str_replace("ë","ë",$txt);

 

It is not supposed to work, if you saved the script in ISO-8859-1 and you try to convert texts i.e. in UTF-8. And I DO NOT recommend converthing them to entities. They will work in nothing but HTML and moreover, the entities do not cover ALL european characters.

[ayok]

Thank you Zyx,

 

No, i think i still don't understand the concept of character encodings. On the top of my index.php there is <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />, is that not enough?

 

So what's should I better do? I use phpmyadmin, and I see the column "collation" if I make a new table. Should I set this to utf8_unicode_ci?

[ayok]

anyone?

[cags]

Collation should be set to utf8 yes. You will also need..

 

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

 

... and possibly...

 

mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'");

 

...directly after connecting to your database for it to work. Combined with the HTML meta tag you have that should fix it.

[ayok]

Ok cags, I'll try it and get back if still have problem. Thank you very much!

[Zyx]

No, in case of UTF-8, most browsers ignore the META tags - this is why you must send a HTTP header, as I said:

 

header('Content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8');

 

Ad. MySQL collations. Actually, utf8_unicode_ci is enough for most of people on the planet. It specifies the general sorting order for UTF-8 strings according to the national characters. The other collations are just the extensions of the general UTF-8 collation that apply some extra language-specific sorting rules. For example, French is perfectly covered by utf8_unicode_ci and it does not require any special collation. On the other hand, Polish has such rules and it has its own collation: utf8_polish_ci. And because this is an extension, it still works perfectly for French.

 

cags -> SET NAMES 'utf8' is enough for a connection .