> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 22:39:39 -0500 (CDT) > Subject: Re: Storing foreign characters in DB > > I am not using 3.xx versions anymore, but if I remember correctly they > only allow a limited control for setting character sets. > > In order to be able to give you any advice you need to be more specific. > > Which character sets are set now for the server and the client as default ? > Are the "foreign characters" in the same character set ? > Are you attempting to store the "foreign character" together with your > default characters in the same table / same DB ? > > Nils Valentin - Tokyo/Japan
Nils, thanks for your response. I've done some reading recommended by you and Rhino (this is all new to me), and have some more specific questions now. First off, I am using MySQL 3.23.58 with the following setup: character set: latin1 character sets: latin1 big5 cp1251 cp1257 croat czech danish dec8 dos estonia euc_kr gb2312 gbk german1 greek hebrew hp8 hungarian koi8_ru koi8_ukr latin2 latin5 swe7 usa7 win1250 win1251 win1251ukr ujis sjis tis620 Here's what I believe is happening: foreign characters entered into a form input field on a website are transmitted to my PHP script with UTF-8 encoding. When this form data is stored in the database as-is, I'm seeing the strange double-characters when I pull it back out of the database because MySQL is set for Latin1 encoding, which is a subset of ISO-8859-1 (right?). So, I think what I need to do is convert the character encoding of the data sent by the HTML form to ISO-8859-1 first *before* I store it in the database. When I do that and then retrieve it, foreign characters display properly. Fortunately, PHP has a character-encoding translation function called "iconv()" which does exactly this. Do I have this figured out correctly? I suppose if I had a newer version of MySQL with Unicode support, I would be able to store data from HTML forms directly without the translation. ? I mostly just need to support foreign characters used in French, German and Spanish mostly. So, I presume that Latin1 is all I need for now. Also, I'm storing this data all in the same database. Monty -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]