Unable to output cyrillic ASCII encoding

Question

I have MySQL field which contains plain text Cyrillic characters (ex. Широка поляна). Collation is utf8_general_ci.

When I pull out this content with MySQL query and try to output it with php I always get ???? symbols. HTML encoding is utf8, document encoding is utf8, mb_detect_encoding() shows ASCII for the string but none of the PHP / MySQL convert functions turns it into something readable.

Yet another SET NAMES question... I can't believe one can't get first 200 results from google with the same answer for just `mysql encoding` query — Your Common Sense, Aug 09 '13 at 10:42

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 09 '13 at 11:49

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For the outdated mysql driver it have to be

mysql_set_charset('utf8');

for mysqli

$mysqli->set_charset('utf8');

for PDO you have to set encoding in DSN:

$dsn = "mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test;charset=utf8";

answered Aug 09 '13 at 11:49

Your Common Sense

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Marcin Orlowski · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-09T11:41:01.870

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You most likely do very common mistake by not setting connection encoding. It's usually done in my.ini config file, but IMHO the better way is to always enforce this in your code. To do so, just execute this query:

SET NAMES encoding;

i.e. for utf8 it would be:

SET NAMES utf8;

You do this just after you connect to database and do it once per connection.

edited Aug 09 '13 at 11:41

answered Aug 09 '13 at 10:43

Marcin Orlowski

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-1 to this one and +1 to other. also, `utf8` is encoding, not collation. – Your Common Sense Aug 09 '13 at 10:46
Oh, so you downvote otherwise valid answer because of wrong word used instead pointing that out or correcting? – Marcin Orlowski Aug 09 '13 at 11:42

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 09 '13 at 10:45

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You have to set charset for your database connection. For this reason you can use mysql_set_charset function.

mysql_set_charset('utf8',$link1);

More information: http://php.net/mysql_set_charset

answered Aug 09 '13 at 10:45

Ahmad

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 09 '13 at 10:55

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Use in first line of php file

 header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

answered Aug 09 '13 at 10:55

alok.kumar

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Unable to output cyrillic ASCII encoding

4 Answers4