PHP- MYSQL Problem with greek

[solon]

Hey guys,

 

I have a problem with searching greek characters in mysql using php script.

 

In the database everything(in greek) is stored as html entities(i.e. α).

 

Now, when i try to search from php like this

$term = $_POST['search'];
$fetch = mysql_query("SELECT  `text`FROM pages INNER JOIN content ON (pages.page_id = content.page_id) WHERE frontpage = '1' and `pages`.`page_title_gr` like '%".$term."%' or  `content`.`text` like '%".$term."%'");

 

the characters are displayed as normal greek letters (i.e. γεια)

and i get no results.

 

What might be the problem?

 

Thanks in advance

[Mchl]

If you stored greek character as html entities (one would wonder why), you have to search for html entitities.

[solon]

The greek characters are stored like that(htlml entities) from a php mysql script. Is there a way to do it differently?

 

Solon

[Mchl]

Yeah. It's called UTF-8

[solon]

i use utf-8 as the encoding but it still stores it like that. I have this in all my files.

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

 

Am i doing something wrong?

[Mchl]

Most likely.

 

Your PHP script is converting these characters somewhere when storing data to database.

 

Also, to properly store and retrieve non-latin characters in database using UTF-8 encoding, you have to set up several things:

1. Set up columns in your database to utf8 encoding (remembering to properly convert already stored data)

2. Set the database-PHP connection to UTF8

3. Set HTTP encoding header to utf8

Also converting your PHP and HTML sources to UTF-8 encoding might be necessary in some cases.

 

This might be quite a lot of work for a larger project.

[solon]

Thanks Mchl,

 

I think i got the idea and actually found the problem... The table chatset is latin for some reason! Thanks again.

[Mchl]

The reason being it used to be default MySQL encoding for a long time.

 

Be aware, that just by changing this to utf8, you will not achieve much.

[solon]

Thank you, i will try to fix it based on your inputs!