I seem need to utf8_encode everything

[Mark Howells]

Hi

I have a gentoo linux/MySQL 4.1.21 system.

Using a PHP script I am trying to insert into a VARCHAR column a byte of ordinal value 171. However it's always stored as ord value 63 '?' unless I expressly utf8_encode it.

I've rebuilt mysql with 'latin1' as the default charset. The tables are created as charset latin1. Here are my vars...

mysql> show variables like '%char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client | latin1 |
| character_set_connection | latin1 |
| character_set_database | latin1 |
| character_set_results | latin1 |
| character_set_server | latin1 |
| character_set_system | utf8 |
| character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
7 rows in set (0.00 sec)


and the (partial) contents of my.cnf ...


[mysql]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets
default-character-set=latin1

[mysqladmin]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets
default-character-set=latin1

[mysqlcheck]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets
default-character-set=latin1

[mysqldump]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets
default-character-set=latin1

[mysqlimport]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets
default-character-set=latin1

[mysqlshow]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets
default-character-set=latin1

[mysqld]
character-set-server = latin1
default-character-set = latin1

All my tables have been created as charset latin and are using latin1_swedish_ci collation.

I've spent two whole days trying to resolve this and am now struggling to find a way forward. Any help would really appreciated.

Cheers

Mark