Posts Tagged ‘SQL’

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:

1

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:

Read the rest of this entry »