I thought I did it correct to define in the header: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> to display chinese characters correct. It works. However, if you type in a form directly, than each character will be translated to UTF-8 with a sequence of #....; I could then count the numbers of # and had the amount of Chinese characters. Now I found that there are other Chinese characters in my database, which I cannot read, but on the web they are displayed correct Chinesse. How can I count these Chinese characters? bye Ronald -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php