Re: cannot change character set (solved)

[Zoltan Sz]

Dear Rick,

Thank you for your detailed reply. You pointed me towards the solution, which is quite simple if one knows what to do and where to do it.

In found out that it is not enough the set the variables on phpMyadmin. There are so-called global variables and session variables. I initially tried to set the global variables but it did not work. In most of the cases only the session variables were changed. But for MySql it does not make any difference to set the session variables in phpMyAdmin because it does not affect the session of the website when it connects. As you pointed out correctly, the only solution is to set the session variables by the client, immediately when the website connects to the database server. It is because of the unfortunate fact if no character set is specified, the connection defaults to latin1. (Defaulting to utf8 would support more characters and I would have had no problem).

The setting in .net takes place in the connection string (it also works for the ado.net data layer). By chance I have found the following description on the web:
If you do not specify the character set, the connection defaults to the latin1 charset. You can specify the character set as part of the connection string, for example:
MySqlConnection myConnection = new MySqlConnection("server=127.0.0.1;uid=root;" +
"pwd=12345;database=test;Charset=latin1;");

I simply had to enter Charset=utf8 and the problem has been solved.

Again, thanks Rick for your invaluable support!

Cheers,
Zoltan