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PHP

Posted by Dustin Scott
Dustin Scott
Courses Plus Student 7,819 Points

Why MySQL displays other languages as question marks

Hi,

I have a bunch of russian text in the database and I want to print it in the web page with PHP. I did all the steps to print it and when I will echo the string it will be as "????? ???????? ? ?????" I changed the collation to utf_general_ci in the database and I added meta charset in the html page. Why this problem is appearing?

Thank you

2 Answers

Jacob Herper
Jacob Herper
94,150 Points
Jacob Herper
Jacob Herper
94,150 Points

You might want to try one of these charsets for MySQL: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-cyrillic-sets.html (I think cp1251_general_ci should work for Russian cyrillic) And windows-1251 for HTML.

Ken Alger
STAFF
Ken Alger
Treehouse Teacher
Ken Alger
Ken Alger
Treehouse Teacher

Dustin;

It has been a while since I have dealt with non-Latin text, but if memory serves there are a few things to the setup of the MVC system to ensure proper functionality.

Model

Make sure the database charset/coallition is UTF-8.

View

When you render the content from the database in a view, make sure the Content-Type is text/html; charset=utf-8.

Controller

On the page you insert these russian characters ( the form, textarea ), make sure the encoding is UTF-8, by setting Content-Type to text/html; charset=utf-8. Enter in Russian text directly to the form input.

On the processing page that handles this form, which inserts it into the database, make sure to do SET NAMES utf8 so it's stored as UTF-8 before you insert the data, in a separate query beforehand.

What versions of MySQL/PHP are you using? Like I said, it has been a while since I have had to do this so things could have changed.

Ken