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Every once in a while, a customer from China will place an order on my site, and sometimes their name and address information will be written to the MySQL database in a series of characters that I can't identify or translate.

For example, the ship-to city of a recent customer appears to me like this:

·s¥_¥«ªo¾ô°Ï

I can say for certain that the database itself, and the fields that hold the customer information, are set to utf8_general_ci collation. The website itself used to have in its header the following content type declaration:

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

but this has been commented out in recent weeks, I believe in an attempt to discover why some Chinese order information was stored in characters like that. Before it was commented out, the same information above would appear like this:

�s�_���o����

Is there an online utility I can use to translate blocks of text in either of those formats into something readable that DHL or another shipping service can use? And how can I reliably prevent information from being stored that way in the future?

Karol S
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geoff
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1 Answers1

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Here's one such online service: http://www.mandarintools.com/email.html

And this is how it fixed your mojibake: 新北市油橋區

As for MySQL:

utf8_general_ci collation

Collation means "how the strings are compared". If the encoding is not set correctly, it is meaningless. You need to use UTF-8 everywhere: for database's encoding and for database connection. Of course it's possible that the data in the database are written in GB-something or EUC-something, I can't guess it based on the information you provided.

Karol S
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  • Thank you! Both for the link to the translation service which worked perfectly, and for the tips on ensuring consistent character encoding everywhere. I think it's likely that the site is not using UTF-8 for the database connection, so that will be the first thing I check. – geoff May 29 '14 at 18:58