Problem with special chars extracting from database in php

[Darla]

Hello

 

I have a database table where I have some values containing the norwegian special letters æ, ø or å.

 

Upon fetching them it seems Ø turns into a simple "?":

 

 

$sql = "SELECT description, count(description) AS count FROM userdata WHERE datetime like '".$datetime."%' GROUP BY description ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 1";
$result = mysql_query($sql);
$descres= mysql_fetch_array($result);

echo "description:" . $descres['description'] ;

 

 

Here is an example of output - the value should have been "SØ" like it is in the database:

"description:S�"

 

Great if someone have some idea why.

 

Darla

[Clinger]

Try viewing the source to ensure that it is a questionmark. Sometimes HTML will draw questionmarks.

[Guest]

Ah, dbs (like mysql) and their tables have a collation set to them, basically it's what the kind of characters it can accept. If you've got access to PHPMyAdmin to your database, you can use that to set the collation to something like latin1_swedish_ci or something of the like.

 

If you don't, you can run something like this SQL against your db

 

ALTER TABLE yourtable DEFAULT COLLATE latin1;

 

At least, that should be it. I'm not 100% sure latin1 is the right collation. Either that or something else characterset related. Probably in the HTML's metatag?

 

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

[effigy]

See if this helps, and make sure your meta tag specifies utf-8.

[Darla]

Hello

 

Thanks for tips, but it seems id did not help. Regarding the ALTER TABLE yourtable DEFAULT COLLATE latin1; - do you think this will help? It is stored correct in the database you see, with SØ. It is when I fetch it in php it turns out wrong. Could there be something with

mysql_fetch_array($result); or something? I have tried utf-8 decoding it but it seems it is not utf-8 code.

[effigy]

What character set is your table? You can find this by running SHOW CREATE TABLE table.

[Darla]

When I run this query in phpmyadmin I get :TYPE=MyISAM, does this indicate the charset?

I get no additional info except for field names etc.

[effigy]

After that I get a DEFAULT CHARSET=.... What version of MySQL are you running? What about phpmyadmin?

[Darla]

I use a server where I only have access to phpmyadmin, when I run the query there (in phpmyadmin) I get no DEFAULT CHARSET in the response :|

[effigy]

How about SELECT @@version? Surely phpmyadmin should show you its version, and I would think MySQL's, somewhere on the page.

[Darla]

Here is the response for SELECT @@version:

 

4.0.24_Debian-10sarge2-log