Cannot store UTF8 characters in MySQL

Question

Cannot find the reason why I am unable to store in a MySQL database characters like ţ, î, ş.

My table definition is:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `gen_         


        

Answer 1

If this:

$text = 'ţ, î, ş';

is your literal code, you need to make sure that the PHP source file is encoded as UTF-8 as well. Otherwise, these characters will be ISO-8859-1 characters in a Unicode context, resulting in broken characters.

Answer 2

Check your MySQL initialization file. It should include these character-set lines:

[client]
port=3306

[mysql]
default-character-set=utf8
port = 3306
#
[mysqld]
basedir=".....
#Path to the database root
datadir=".....
# The default character set that will be used when a new schema or table is
# created and no character set is defined
character-set-server=utf8

Answer 3

Expanding my comments into an answer:

It seems that you have set up things correctly, and are only stuck on inserting a string literal to the database. To do that successfully you must also ensure that your text encoding for the saved PHP script is also UTF-8.

Most decent editors will let you know which encoding you are currently working with and can also save as (i.e. convert between) different encodings (even Notepad does this today). However, as a quick check you can add the character € to your file somewhere and save it. If the file size changes by 1 or 2 bytes instead of 3, you are not on UTF-8 and you need to convert the file to that encoding.

Other than that, when receiving text as input from the browser your code should handle it just fine.

Note: While using a <meta> tag to set the encoding for your page should be sufficient, it's better if you do this with an HTTP header from PHP like this:

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

Answer 4

as I ran your script it worked for me:

$charset = "UTF8";
$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'root', '') or die('connection?');
mysql_select_db('test') or die('database?');
if(function_exists("mysql_set_charset")){
    mysql_set_charset($charset, $link);
}else{
    mysql_query("SET NAMES $charset");   
}

$text = 'ţ, î, ş';
mysql_query("insert into gen_admin_words_translated (word_id, lang_id, value, needUpd) values (1, 1, '$text', 1)");

$query = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM  `gen_admin_words_translated`');
$array = mysql_fetch_array($query);

print_r($array)

result:

Array
(
    [0] => 2689
    [id] => 2689
    [1] => 1
    [word_id] => 1
    [2] => ţ, î, ş
    [value] => ţ, î, ş
    [3] => 1
    [lang_id] => 1
    [4] => 1
    [needUpd] => 1
)

things to check:

check if your webpage is really UTF-8, maybe you have some chaset set another place.

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

file encoding should be also UTF-8 as it may break your characters if otherwise ..

Answer 5

Does the last result you pasted come from MySQL Command-Line? If does, try SET NAMES utf8; before query SELECT * FROM gen_admin_words_translated

Answer 6

In this statement, you are inserting characters as they exist in the current PHP file:

$text = 'ţ, î, ş';

However, they will be encoded using the character encoding of your PHP file. Unless this PHP file uses UTF-8 encoding itself, the resulting string won't be UTF-8 encoded.

You should use your text editor to check the character encoding used on the current file. All decent text editors should be able to display, and some may be able to convert, the character encoding used in a document.

To create more portable code, ensuring the character encoding of your document doesn't matter, you can use encoded values like this:

$text = "\xC5\xA3, \xC3\xAE, \xC5\x9F";

Unfortunately, if you have to do a lot of this it'll be a pain, because you have to use the multi-byte hex representation - PHP doesn't have a native Unicode way of specifying characters like some other languages (where you can go "\u163" instead of "\xC5\xA3").

You can look up the UTF-8 representation in hex using tools like this.