Re: Tired of MYSQL and Character Set Problems!

[Alexander Barkov]

Writting meta tags is a good idea. However, according to HTTP
standard, the "Content-Type: text/html; charset=xxx" has higher
priority over the meta tag. So the first thing you need is to check
whether your HTTP server sends correct Content-Type header:

It should be either with charset=utf-8:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

or with empty charset - to make browser honor META tags:

Content-Type: text/html


Note, by default, apache sends this header:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

which is wrong in your case - meta tags cannot help.
That can be the reason.


The second thing to check - whether the value gets
garbled during INSERT or during SELECT later.
You can use this query:
SELECT HEX(column) FROM table_name;

If you can see lots of '3F' substrings (which is the code for question mark),
then the values most likely were garbled during INSERT. It this is the case,
then turn on MySQL query log and check the INSERT queries - are they really
encoded in utf8? If you don't know how to do it - feel free to send the
log to me: <bar at mysql dot com>


Otherwise, you need to check what happens during SELECTs.
Do you display the inserted data on a Web page?
Or do you use some other MySQL clients? For example "mysql" or Query Browser.
What is your OS?