Submitting foreign language characters in myqsl from form

[optik]

If I directly add München to my database it's fine but when inserting from a form the umlauted U gets replaced by other letters.

[ZakAltF4]

I would use ASCII for special characters. Use a str replace in your php... Something like

string that needs to be customized
$string = "blah blah blah München";


$r_string = str_replace("Ü", "Ü", $string);
$r_string = str_replace("ü", "ü", $string);

I use this method for storing a lot of special characters in MySQL..

[optik]

There a lot of special foreign characters though, I don't really want to pass every SQL insert through a mass of str_replace functions.

[ZakAltF4]

This is the code I use:

I use this to prepare my string to be "clean"

function clean_for_mysql($string,$max_length) {    
 $in_string = ltrim($string);    
 $in_string = rtrim($in_string);
 if (round($max_length) < 1) { 
  $max_length = 131072; // 128K
 }
 if (strlen($in_string) > $max_length) {
  $new_string = substr($in_string,0,$max_length);
 }
 $new_string = mysql_real_escape_string($new_string);
 return $new_string;
}

Then I use str replace with arrays:

$string = "Your String";
$search = array('€', 'ƒ', 'Ö', 'Ü');
$replace = array('€', 'ƒ', 'Ö', 'Ü');
echo str_replace($search, $replace, $string);

How many special characters are you REALLY expecting? ... My list is about 50-60. This was semi time consuming, but not terribly so. Definitely something you could do in an afternoon.

[enigma1]

And you shouldn't replace anything. Do you use a proper content-type with the form document? Is it UTF-8? Also make sure the content type is consistent with the database character set/collation you've setup and you're using.

[henry0]

Not to mention that sometimes MySQL will on its own replace the "&" in &#whatever; by the equivalent entity
thus rendering the content barely readable.
Did not find yet any way to avoid it!

[optik]

I agree enigma, the content-type of the page is set to UTF-8 and this is the same content-type PHPMyAdmin is using when it successfully submits these characters.

[enigma1]

Ok when your script connects to the database do you setup the character set and the names? Also was the database created with utf8?
[dev.mysql.com...]

Basically when you add content to the db via your script forms, what you type is what you should see stored. You can dump the /POST array when the form is submitted and before the db write and see if the posted arguments look ok.