Question

Our website was developed with a meta tag set to...

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

This works fine for M-dashes and special quotes, etc. However, I have an issue when data has been entered into a CMS component that stores data in MySQL. The MySQL collation is set to UTF8_swedish_ci (I read this is ok and must have been a default when it was set up in phpMySqlAdmin).

The problem I now get is when I output info from the DB to the page, the characters are utf8 encoded, so I run them through the uft8_decode() php function. I thought this would fix the incompatibility, but what I m getting isn t what I expect.

When I look at the data in the DB in a text field (again through phpMySqlAdmin) it looks like this...

This – That

When I view it on the screen it looks like...

This ? That

I know I can try to find/replace a bunch of these in the DB or the text, but I m hoping there s an easier way to do this programatically.

Thanks, Don

Update:

Still have an issue that htmlentities() unfortunately doesn t fix.

I have text in a file like this: we’ve (special ). My MySQL collation is "latin1_swedish_ci" (the default). If I change the header or meta to either iso/utf one or the other breaks. W/ utf-8 the (’) a black diamond but the db content is fine. With iso, the inline content is ok, but the content from the db has all kinds of Â and other chars. Tried changing MySQL collation to utf-8 but didn t see a difference.

I m about resolved to changing the items manually. Thanks for any other suggestions.

Answer 1

If your data in the database is UTF8, you ll need to run this query after you connect to MySQL:

SET NAMES UTF8

Answer 2

Assuming that you were able to set the encoding properly in your database, my recommended approach here is to:

Make sure that the Content-Type header has been set properly by the server. This can be done in php by using the header function.

header( Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 );

Note that this takes precedence and is the easiest information to get since user agents do not have to parse it.

Set the meta tag in the HTML file.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/>

For further readings, refer to:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

http://www.webstandards.org/learn/articles/askw3c/dec2002/

Answer 3

My guess would be that despite you meta tag, the web server sends a header which sets the charset to UTF-8. However, the easiest way to fix these kinds of problems is usually to escape non-ASCII-characters to HTML entities.

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