UTF8 and Japanese characters

Question

Problem: Foreign character are not displayed as they should be. This includes German, Japanese, Russian and all others excluding English (works perfectly). Ones PHP makes a

Answer 1

See: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#h-5.2.2

So you should use: <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Ideally this info shall be supplied in headers of HTTP response.

Answer 2

You most likely need to set the character set of your database connection to UTF-8.

How to do that depends on the database library you are using.

In the old mySQL library, it would be

mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8");

(pre mySQL 5.0.7) and

mysql_set_charset("utf8");

for mySQL 5.0.7 and newer.

Answer 3

try calling

mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8");

somewhere before your query. of course if you're on PHP.

Answer 4

mysql utf-8 is not the real utf-8. it uses 3 bytes instead of 4. For real utf-8, you have to use utf8mb4:

mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8mb4");
mysql_set_charset("utf8mb4");