Re: PHP charset encoding

On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 11:23:03AM +0300, nabil wrote: > Hi all, > > I have problem storing the submitted data in the database in the right > encoding. > I need to use UTF-8 > > I need to save the Arabic text in UTF-8 encoding. > > I have a problem with UTF-8 and windows-1256 conversion. > I wish I can understand those things, coz encoding thing will take my hair > off.... > > When submitting a data from an HTML page and inserting them in MySQL: > what encoding they will be ? > is it the page encoding? > the field size like VARCHAR 15 won't fit the same in both encoding for the > same text. !! > Is the font any relation with encoding? > phpmyadmin doesn't support UTF-8 so dumping your data using it will screw it > up.... is it a way to convert it inside the database... > > Explain to me please , or if you can tell me where to find my answers (not > google) > if the page that the input form is on sets utf-8 as the content type, then most (?) browsers will send utf-8. you can use a meta tag like: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> utf-8 characters are 8 bit clean, so they can be stored and retrieved in mysql 3.x ok, but proper utf-8 sorting etc. doesn't work. for many purposes though it seems to be ok. single characters in utf-8 encoding do look like multiple characters as far as 8 bit text handling programs are concerned (so yes, 15 characters in iso-8859-1 or ascii isn't the same length as 15 characters in utf-8). fonts that support utf-8 are required for properly displaying utf-8, and you have to specify utf-8 on the display page (either via a content-type header or with content-type meta tag as above) to get the browser to use the right fonts. - rob