Newby needs some help - collation/charset ?

[Marvin Miller]

Hi Folks!

I really need some help with an issue that seems to be related to collation or charset or perhaps the fact that I'm using a too new version of MySQL for the code?

This is a PHP website (forum) with MySQL on a separate machine. Versions are PHP 5.4.14 MySQL 5.6.13 It used to work with an older PHP and an older MySQL version.

Symptoms are that some PHP scripts being run against the dB fail. In particular, two come to mind. One, an insert statement that inserts a bunch of German into the table (causing me to wonder about strange characters) and the second is that a user reported that he uses Word for Windows to create his posts before copying & pasting them into the forum. Whenever he does this, and the post contains comma's, exclamation marks etc - the post fails.

The table collation settings in MySQL for the failed queries is utf8_general_ci

Can anyone point me the right direction? I can include a MySQL script that fails each time. When the issue occurs you get the regular square box in your browser window stating that there is a dB error but there is never any content in that box - it's empty.

This is becoming really troublesome - any advice or pointers would be appreciated.