On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 18:47 -0800, Rob Gould wrote:
> I've got a PHP application that pulls in data from a mySQL database. The data is a series of wine producers, and many of them have special foreign characters over the a's and o's.
>
> When I go and view the data from my database using myPHPAdmin, the characters look fine, but when I pull the data into my web-page the special characters get messed up.
>
> For whatever reason, when I first set up the database, someone told me to preserve special characters by setting my collation for the wine-producer field to "latin1_swedish_ci". The data seems to be in there ok, so at least that works.
>
> Should I have used utf-8 instead? Can I set something in the doctype or header of my web-page to make it so that my website displays latin1_swedish_ci-based characters properly, or should I change my database field-type to be something different? My main fear is messing up the database (I'll back up first if I have to chance the field collation)
SOunds like your website is UTF8 and your DB as you say is latin1. You
have a few choices. You can set the php.ini config value:
default_charset = "iso-8859-1"
You can also set the meta tag (probably best to set the PHP config and
the meta tag):
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1" />
Or, and this is what I would do, convetr your database to UTF-8. That
way you're prepared for the rest of the world. In this day and age I
would creat a site with anything but UTF-8.
Here's some reading for you:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
Cheers,
Rob.
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