Charset Problem

The image above is showing part of a small hack I coded for a phpBB board to show topics from selected sections. Those question marks were suppose to be Arabic letters, but after a recent update to phpBB the hack failed to use the board config file to connect so I had to set up my own direct connection to the DB.

The connection was fine, but I got “?????” instead of something I can read in Arabic. After some tests I figured out, though the MySQL DB is using UTF-8 as a character set, which means it can handle the language efficiently, I had to set the character set to UTF-8 via PHP for every query using the following code:

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mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET utf8");

What is even better is setting the character set at once with a single line of code for the whole connection by using the following code:

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mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'", $db);

This code should be used directly after the connection, as in the following example:

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 $db = mysql_connect('localhost','DB_USER','DB_PASSWORD') 
or die("Could not connect");
 
mysql_select_db('DB_NAME',$db) or die("Could not connect"); 
 
  // Set character set to UTF-8
  //
  mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'", $db);

Now I got my topics in readable Arabic once again!

Charset Problem Solved