Chinese characters in PHP / MySQL

How to replace a bunch of?...

[ph_eze_nouz]

Hi,

I am working on a new version on a site in Chinese. I tried to enter directly the characters into a MySQL database, but I cannot retrieve the content properly, I have lots of strange characters even if I use <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

So, I tried a very simple test: a page in PHP displaying the content of a variable passed in the URL. With ASCII characters, no problems, but with Chinese ones, I have a bunch of?

Does anybody can tell me how to use these characters in PHP / MySQL?

Many thanks for your help ;)

[futuresky]

Just an idea and no guarantee it'll do what you need as I've not tried it, but would htmlentities work? It may be worthwhile looking into html_entity_decode() (ie the reverse of htmlentities) as well.

[ph_eze_nouz]

Hi,

I have done another test which basically solved my problem ;) I created a first page with used the following specification:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

I add a link with Chinese characters passed in the URL. A second page, also using the UTF-8, then read properly these characters from the URL ;)

I hope this could help other people learning more on this topic ;)

All the best

[ergophobe]

You may find the following threads on character encoding useful

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

(see especially the link to Scott Reynen's article in the second thread, since he is dealing with Japanese chars and similar problems).

Tom