Fetching strings with special alphabet from MySQL database

Question

I have a php variable which has its value set from an HTML form. The value of the variable is

$x = rueFrédéricMistral

As you may see it has a special alphabet (e_tilda) in it.

Now when I echo x, it gives me the following: rueFr�d�ricMistral

I am not sure how to echo the original name. I tried the function htmlspecialchars() but it didn't work. On reading, what I understood that the function does not suit my case.

Can anyone help me on this please.

Thanks in advance. Neeraj

Possible duplicate of [Getting special characters out of a MySQL database with PHP](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15892610/getting-special-characters-out-of-a-mysql-database-with-php) — usman ikram, Oct 26 '17 at 11:52

Bilal Ahmed · Answer 1 · 2017-10-26T15:02:38.057

0

you can also try this

echo htmlentities($x);

and also you can used this

for server side

<?php
    header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1');
?>

for client side

    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
    </head>
    <body>
        <?php
            $x = "rueFrédéricMistral";
            echo $x;
        ?>
    </body>

edited Oct 26 '17 at 15:02

answered Oct 26 '17 at 11:54

Bilal Ahmed

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I tried this and it is not working. However, the issue comes when I try to use $x in javascript. I wrote the following code in javascript: var abcd = ; alert(abcd).... But I get null in the alert message – Neeraj Saxena Oct 26 '17 at 13:20

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 26 '17 at 11:54

There is at least 3 possible reasons:

(most likely) you have incorrect charset definition into your html page, make sure that you have something like <meta charset="utf8"/> inside <head> section of your page
It is possible that you have defined wrong charset for your database connection. Refer to documentation for functions / library that you're using to connect to database
(unlikely) It is possible that contents inside database is broken by itself e.g. due to migration / inserting using invalid charset.

Fetching strings with special alphabet from MySQL database

2 Answers2