OK, I took your problem from the other end. I tried to see what you're trying to store. I entered your 0x9F54 in a text file (using binary editor) and opened it in Firefox. Guess what! When the encoding is set to Big5, I just got a "?". But if I switch to Big5-HKSCS, I've got the "麁" character! Ah! A step backward is thus necessary: let's look at the standard of Big5. I can't find any official website mentioning the Big5 standard. I just found this page which seems good enough for me: http://www.answers.com/topic/big5 Look, your 0x9F54 is in the "Reserved zone"! It is thus undefined in standard Big5. It's only defined in HK's extended standard! I'm not sure it's a direct cause to your problem, but it's a hint. As a side note, this character (that I've never seen before!) is perfectly defined in Unicode. Again another example to convince you to abandon the dinos..., ahem, legacy Big5 encoding :-) ---------- * Zoner PhotoStudio 8 - Your Photos perfect, shared, organised! www.zoner.com/zps You can download your free version. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php