Re: question about database field-types and special characters

On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 18:47 -0800, Rob Gould wrote: > I've got a PHP application that pulls in data from a mySQL database. The data is a series > of wine producers, and many of them have special foreign characters over the a's and o's. > > > When I go and view the data from my database using myPHPAdmin, the characters look fine, but > when I pull the data into my web-page the special characters get messed up. > > For whatever reason, when I first set up the database, someone told me to preserve special > characters by setting my collation for the wine-producer field to "latin1_swedish_ci". > The data seems to be in there ok, so at least that works. > > Should I have used utf-8 instead? Can I set something in the doctype or header of my web-page > to make it so that my website displays latin1_swedish_ci-based characters properly, or should I > change my database field-type to be something different? My main fear is messing up the database > (I'll back up first if I have to chance the field collation) SOunds like your website is UTF8 and your DB as you say is latin1. You have a few choices. You can set the php.ini config value: default_charset = "iso-8859-1" You can also set the meta tag (probably best to set the PHP config and the meta tag): <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> Or, and this is what I would do, convetr your database to UTF-8. That way you're prepared for the rest of the world. In this day and age I would creat a site with anything but UTF-8. Here's some reading for you: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html Cheers, Rob. -- .------------------------------------------------------------. | InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com | :------------------------------------------------------------: | An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting | | a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services | | such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn | | also provides an extremely flexible architecture for | | creating re-usable components quickly and easily. | `------------------------------------------------------------'