Cannot properly insert greek characters in mysql database

Question

Our mysql database shows Î Î¿Î»Ï Î³Î»Ï…ÎºÏŒÏ in place of greek characters while sending data from an emulator to a mysql database. Other characters are left ok.

Answer 1

Your whole php/mysql setup seems to be encoded with utf-8, but the java code isn't, starting from there:

httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
httpPost = new HttpPost(params[0]);
httpPost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs));

First, the DefaultHttpClient class seems to be deprecated. However, docs say that

This class sets up the following parameters if not explicitly set:

• ContentCharset: HTTP.DEFAULT_CONTENT_CHARSET

The http default charset is ISO-8859-1 according to the java constant field values

The HttpPost itself does not appear to mingle with character sets.

But the UrlEncodedFormEntity does. Also from the docs:

UrlEncodedFormEntity(Iterable parameters)
Constructs a new UrlEncodedFormEntity with the list of parameters with the default encoding of HTTP.DEFAULT_CONTENT_CHARSET

Since ISO-8859-1 can't keep greek characters, passing them through those instances will modify them, hence breaking the characters in your php code.

All of this code seems to be deprecated, but change java to output utf-8 encoded characters:

HttpParams httpParams = new BasicHttpParams();
HttpProtocolParams.setContentCharset(httpParams ,"UTF-8");
httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient(httpParams);
httpPost = new HttpPost(params[0]);
httpPost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs,"UTF-8"));

and remove redundancy in your php:

ini_set("default_charset", "UTF-8");
header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_http_input("utf-8");

Header will overwrite the ini_set, so you can remove it, and the http input is already in utf8 (since we just transformed it in java), so you can remove it too:

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