Storing Chinese and Other Symbols MySql

[glenelkins]

Hi

 

Not sure if this is in the right forum, but essentially I think i need to do something in php before storing strings.

 

I may need to store Chinese, Russian, German and other symbols in the database exactly, i don't want them converting to unicode or anything like that. I looked at mysql collations and none of them seem to work for every single language, they are mainly language specific.

 

So a) what collation do i need b) what do i need to do to strings to be able to save any character i want in mysql

 

thanks

[Deoctor]

you need to convert the values to the unicode values.

 

[glenelkins]

ok here is a better example.

 

the php code scrapes the category URLs from alexa, and it gets to this URL in alexas html: http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/World/Catala

 

this example url, the last "a" on Catala has an accent symbol above it. But when I echo the variable from PHP, its converted that small "a" with the accent, to a capitol "A" with an accent. Why is it doing that? Thats not what I need. If you goto the category on alexa, you will see what it should be www.alexa.com/topsites/category -> World ->Catala