php mysql character set: storing html of international content

Question

i\'m completely confused by what i\'ve read about character sets. I\'m developing an interface to store french text formatted in html inside a mysql database.

What i

Answer 1

MySQL performs character set conversions on the fly to something called the connection charset. You can specify this charset using the sql statement

SET NAMES utf8

or use a specific API function such as mysql_set_charset():

mysql_set_charset("utf8", $conn);

If this is done correctly there's no need to use functions such as utf8_encode() and utf8_decode().

You also have to make sure that the browser uses the same encoding. This is usually done using a simple header:

header('Content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8');

(Note that the charset is called utf-8 in the browser but utf8 in MySQL.)

In most cases the connection charset and web charset are the only things that you need to keep track of, so if it still doesn't work there's probably something else your doing wrong. Try experimenting with it a bit, it usually takes a while to fully understand.