0

I have the following character ó stored in a VARCHAR column on a MySQL database. The collation for this column is utf8_general_ci

On the webpage I have the following meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Yet when the data is pulled out and displayed it show as: �

But ONLY on my Mac.

If I had mysql_query("SET NAMES 'UTF8'"); then it displays properly on my Mac.

On my PC it displays properly, but when I add mysql_query("SET NAMES 'UTF8'"); it displays incorrectly.

What am I missing?

kylex
  • 14,178
  • 33
  • 114
  • 175

1 Answers1

1

There are lots of things that could be causing this, and the web browsers you have tried might try to be helpful in different ways or have different defaults.

Judging from MySQL manual 9.1.10. Unicode Support, SET NAMES 'UTF8' should be used if you want UTF-8 output from MySQL.

Your content-type looks a bit strange, is it a typo? It should probably be:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

I'd start by using a network sniffer (for example TCPView or Wireshark) or some other means to verify that the output from the server really is UTF-8, i.e. that the ó is sent from the server as 0xC3 0xB3. If that is ok, check for problems with Content-type settings.

Anders Lindahl
  • 41,582
  • 9
  • 89
  • 93
  • Yea, the charset was a typo... I'll take a look at it. Thanks. – kylex Mar 16 '11 at 19:20
  • Huh, when I change the charset to iso-8859-1 it works on both. Why is that? – kylex Mar 16 '11 at 19:23
  • The output from the database is (I guess) encoded in iso-8859-1 unless you specify `SET NAMES 'UTF-8'`, and `ó` exists in that encoding. – Anders Lindahl Mar 16 '11 at 19:26
  • Hmm, my knowledge in mysql-with-php is obviously limited. http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-set-charset.php seems to be the preferred way of setting encoding, as suggested here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1650591/whether-to-use-set-names – Anders Lindahl Mar 22 '11 at 06:39