FIXED | Charset SESSION vs GLOBAL

[Cédric Michel]

Hi all,

Why are the SESSION VARIABLES different from GLOBAL?
I doesn't find any config option for setting defaut SESSION in latin1.

I got a problem with an old server (local server) running many (old) sites. On recent projects, we use SET NAMES (latin1 or utf8) and it works fine.

But for old projects in latin1, we've got a charset issue, even if (I think ?!) all config files (apache, php and mysql) are well configured for latin1 by default.
i.e. /etc/mysql/my.cnf:

[mysqld]
character-set-server   = latin1
default-character-set   = latin1
# Added for test
init-connect                = 'SET NAMES latin1'

The problem doesn't comes from this config file which is well interpreted... but for GLOBAL VARIABLES:

# SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES like "char%";
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/

# SHOW SESSION VARIABLES like "char%"; 
character_set_client => utf8
character_set_connection => utf8
character_set_database => latin1
character_set_results => utf8
character_set_server => latin1
character_set_system => utf8
character_sets_dir => /usr/share/mysql/charsets/

Site is running on PHP 5.2.2 (CGI/FastCGI). No charset definition in .htaccess.
If I had a .htaccess with AddHandler application/x-httpd-php
=> same error on PHP 4.4.8 (Apache 2.0 Handler)

Of course, tests are made without any local modification like mysql_set_charset (>=PHP 5.2.3), SET NAMES...

mysql_client_encoding (PHP) returns utf8

Any suggestion?

Thanks, Cédric