Storing and converting UTF8 Arabic in MySQL DB using Perl

[Nasser Ahmed]

Hi,

I need a little help.

I initially had a text file with Arabic in it encoded using the windows-1256 charset. I used "iconv -f WINDOWS-1256 -t UTF-8 -o foo-out.txt foo.txt" to convert the file to UTF8.

The file now contains the following arabic:

مَنْ صَلَّى صَلَاةً لَمْ يَقْرَأْ فِيهَا بِأُمِّ الْقُرْآنِ فَهِيَ خِدَاجٌ

In a browser this utf8 data is displayed perfectly as Arabic (with the correct utf-8 charset encoding), however I need to store this data as native Arabic in a MySQL DB (4.1.18) but can't seem to convert and store the utf8 data as Arabic shown below.

مَنْ صَلَّى صَلَاةً لَمْ يَقْرَأْ فِيهَا بِأُمِّ الْقُرْآنِ فَهِيَ خِدَاجٌ

I am using Perl 5.8.0 to complete this task with the following commands:

$dbh->do("set character set utf8");
$dbh->do("set names utf8");

And also have the DB tables to the correct charset as well.

I have also tried the following MySQL function in Perl:

$test_utf8 = "CONVERT(_utf8'$data' USING utf8)";

But nothing seems to work.

Any help would be greatly appreciated?

Nasser



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/02/2006 07:24AM by Nasser Ahmed.