Non Latin Characters & ouch

Question

I\'m getting to know Cake PHP, which has unearthed a general question about best practice in terms of PHP / MySQL character set stuff, which I\'m hoping can be answered here

Answer 1

That question comes here often.

UTF8 should work. Make sure that:

1. Your database collation uses utf8 (utf8 bin general)

2. You html document encoding tag is set to utf8

3. AND VERY IMPORTANT - most people forget that bit - make sure all your source files are saved as utf8. Use notepad++ on pc or Coda/TextMate/TextWrangler on mac to make sure the encoding is correct. If you don't do that, some transformation/re-interpretation of the characters may happen

EDIT: And forget about htmlentities, you don't need it if you use utf8 encoding all throughout

Answer 2

Make sure the MySQL connection is set to UTF-8 while importing the data. The collation is only used for sorting and comparison, not for saving data.

You can set the charset of the connection using SET NAMES 'utf-8'; in the beginning of your SQL file.