Hello everyone,
first of all, sorry if this is the wrong place to post this message.
First, let me describe the situation. I have just completed a guestbook for my private website
http://davygora.name/?page=guestbook and now it is in the test phase. My site is hosted at a remote hosting service. On their servers they have MySQL 4.1.13 installed. On my laptop I have the version 5.1.37. I have the same database structure on the remote host and on my localhost. In fact, I created the database at the remote host, then exported it to an SQL file which I then imported at the localhost.
Now, what happens when I try to post messages in cyrillic letters in my guestbook is this: the letters "А", "Ё", "Н", "с", "э" and "я" (case sensitive) are somehow converted in a wrong way and in the guestbook they display as �? . However, this happens only at the remote host. On my localhost everything works just fine.
When I view the table in phpmyadmin, in both cases the messages are presented in some strange unreadable symbols. Ok, I don't care about that, it should only be displayed correctly on the website.
Now, the only difference between the two hosts than I can think of, is the version of MySQL. Can it be the source of the problem?
The website is encoded in utf-8. The table fields are set for utf-general encoding too. And, as said, the table is exactly the same at the remote host and at the localhost. The really funny thing is that most of the cyrillic letters are displayed correctly, except for the six mentioned above.
I'd appreciate any help or suggestion. Thanks in advance!
P.S. (added later) Now I experience similar problems on localhost, however the behaviour is very strange. Sometimes the letters mentiones earlier are displayed correctly and sometimes not. I don't see any correlation with anything whatsoever.
Is there a way to convert between the php's UTF-8 and the mysql's UTF-8 which seem to be different encodings?
P.P.S. (most recent addendum) All right, I have solved the problem. The trick was to perform the query "SET NAMES utf8;" right after connecting to mysql server. No more help needed, the thread can be closed.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/28/2010 11:41AM by Yuriy Davygora.