PHP/MySQL encoding problems. � instead of certain characters

Question

I have come across some problems when inputting certain characters into my mysql database using php. What I am doing is submitting user inputted text to a database. I cannot

Answer 1

The solutions provided are helpful if starting from scratch. Putting all possible connections to UTF-8 is indeed the safest. UTF-8 is the most used charset on the net for a variety of reasons.

Some suggestions and a word of warning:

• copy the tables you want to sanitize with a unique prefix (tmp_)
• although your db-connection is forced to utf8, check you General Settings collation, change to utf8_bin if that was not done yet
• you need to run this on the local server
• the funny char error is mostly due to mixing LATIN1 with UTF-8 configurations. This solution is designed for this. It could work with other used char-sets that LATIN1 but I haven't checked this
• check these tmp_tables extensively before copying back to the original

Builds the 2 array needed for the magic:

$chars = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
$LATIN1 = $UTF8 = array();
while (list($key,$val) = each ($chars)) {
    $UTF8[] = $key;
    $LATIN1[] = $val;
}

Now build up the routines you need: (tables->)rows->fields and at each field call

$row[$field] = mysql_real_escape_string(str_replace($LATIN1 , $UTF8 , $row[$field]));
$q[] = "$field = '{$row[$field]}'";

Finally build up and send the query:

mysql_query("UPDATE $table SET " . implode(" , " , $q) . " WHERE id = '{$row['id']}' LIMIT 1");