Hi Guys,

Whenever i post the value £ to a mysql database it seems to store it as £

the table is :
utf8_unicode_ci

( So i can have other languages in it )

I cant seem to get rid of this **** char.
Ive tried using str_replace. But that fails.


Whats going on? Any idea where its coming from?

Thanks
G

I think its an encoding issue.

Still no closer to figuring out how to resolve it tho

What are you using to display the field?

It grabs it from the database.
The value in the DB is £

The page displaying it has charset utf-8

and the page that sends it to the DB is set to utf-8 also

print out the unicode values that are being stored and retrieved to debug where the problem is occuring.

Try decoding the data after pulling it from the database

PHP Code:

echo utf8_decode('£'); 


Output:

£

This is SOOO odd.

Decoding it still shows its as the two odd chars.

It send it the DB as '£' However the DB inputs it as A£

Ah ha.

Ive put the decode in the "input" part.

$message = utf8_decode($message);

I just wonder if thats gonna break any translation it currently does for other languages...

using
$message = utf8_decode($message);

when it retrives the data still shows the A£

****,
Yeah it breaks other unicode chars ( im assuming cos its decoded before entry to the DB )

Are they being stored as four bytes each (00 C2 00 A3) in the database?

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Are they being stored as four bytes each (00 C2 00 A3) in the database?

How do i show that mate?

Echo out the character values in the string.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.chr.php

Ive found the issue,

Its the htmlentities function.

Grrr
I dont know how to get round this...
I want to be able to display html code ( so it doesnt get run ) but if i take htmlentities out everything is fine.

Any ideas how i can use htmlentities and still retain the correct encoding?

Ah ha!

found i should be using htmlspecialchars instead.

This seems to retain the utf-8 encoding.

Something like -> http://www.webmaster-talk.com/html-f...tml#post294819 <- then

Yarp

All sorted now,
I found that using htmlentities is apparently not recommended anymore ( cant find WHY but people say using htmlspecialchars is faster (doubt you could notice ))

Anyway.
i didnt put in the UTF-8 field in htmlentities and that broke it, However im using htmlspecialchars now and it seems to work fine


It was killing my brain as if i outputted the data directly to the page it would show fine, So i figured something has to be wrong with my code / sanity checking as the html page itself was fine and the DB was fine.

I hate issues like this lol.

TY yall. Another mystery solved