MySql spanish character data

Question

i hav a database that contains spanish characters. to populate the database i am getting the values from client page which has character encoding=UTF-8. when i insert the va

Answer 1

Change your mysql database/ table / column encoding to UTF-8 (and also set the collation to a compatible value).

ALTER TABLE mytable CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
ALTER TABLE mytable 
MODIFY country CHAR(50) 
CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Also specify the char set at the PHP side when connecting.

mysql_set_charset('utf8',$conn); 

Take a look at this article for further info and a script to batch change every table / column in a database.

Answer 2

Check two things first:

• Are you inserting the data as UTF-8? If the data is coming from a web page, make sure the page's encoding is set to UTF-8 (encoding meta tag is set in the page header).
• Are you sure the data is not saved as Unicode? This is the reverse situation: if phpMyAdmin uses something else other than UTF-8, you'd see the garbled characters when it displays the contents.

Answer 3

I just wasted 4 hours on the same problem as you.

Everything is in UTF-8

EG:

<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

The MySQL database is in UTF-8 PHP is in UTF-8

After four hours and on many occasions tearing my hair out I have found a solution that works.

$content = htmlentities($row[mystring], ENT_QUOTES, "ISO-8859-1");
$content = html_entity_decode($content);

It takes the accents converts them to html characters then converts them back into UTF-8

This is a great hack and it works perfectly.

For some inexplicable reason, the data in my MYSQL database is not in the UTF-8 format even though I have gone to extreme measures like exporting the data to a text file in phpmyadmin saving it as UTF-8 in a text editor and re-importing it. None of this worked.