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i have a webserver setup consisting of Codeigniter, Mysql and Apache.

One a page load i fetch data from a mysql table which looks like:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `names_table` (
`id` integer NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
....
`name` varchar(180) NOT NULL,
....
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin;

The data on the serverside is displayed with

echo $this->db->get_where('names_table', array('id' => '6'))->result()->name;

The header of the page served to the client is sent via

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");

plus i am setting the meta information to

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

The PHP file serving the client request is encoded in UTF-8 without BOM, but the name is displayed like Schönefeld although is should be Schönefeld.

The name field with the corresponding id in names_table has 536368c383c2b66e6566656c64 stored in it.

I spent a few hours searching for possible solutions and i already applied all hints i found so far without working. Thank you very much.

EDIT:

Before displaying the data to the client i run

mb_detect_encoding($name_field);

which says it is UTF-8. I am viewing the page in Chrome where UTF-8 encoding is set, too.

If i understand it correctly, i should not call utf8_decode() on the variable returned from the database because the browser already understands that the document is in UTF8 and takes appropriate action to decode it, correct?

RESOLVED

As it turns out the data in the table was not imported correctly. I had to use an explicit statement about the character set for it, like here

Community
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Philipp
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  • Have you set the connection encoding to `utf8` in the CI database configuration? I'm not a CI guy, so can't tell you where exactly that is, but that's your problem... – deceze Nov 01 '12 at 16:04
  • Yes, i have set the character set to utf8 and the database collation to utf8_bin. – Philipp Nov 01 '12 at 16:08
  • In the *Codeigniter database connection configuration file*, right? – deceze Nov 01 '12 at 16:34
  • Well, maybe http://kunststube.net/frontback can give some more inspiration... – deceze Nov 01 '12 at 16:48

2 Answers2

1

Set the connection to UTF-8.

MySQL:

SET NAMES utf8;

With mysql:

mysql_set_charset('utf8', $connection);

With mysqli:

$connection->set_charset('utf8');

Etc.

D. Marti
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  • I put this statement before every query to the database for testing. It does not work. – Philipp Nov 01 '12 at 16:42
  • You do not put it before every query. You put it once right after creating the connection. – D. Marti Nov 01 '12 at 16:50
  • P.S. Also make sure that the character set is not set to something different in your server, because it WILL override your html meta tags. In Apache there's a directive for this: AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 – D. Marti Nov 01 '12 at 16:54
  • I have enabled the default charset as UTF-8 in apache. – Philipp Nov 01 '12 at 17:12
1

Make sure your file has been saved as UTF-8 without BOM.

It depends what IDE you use but for example in Notepad++ There is a Encoding File Menu.

Haso Keric
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