Skip to main content

Storing unicode texts in MySQL with phpMyAdmin

Today, I've received a personal mail/request from Sivanantham Hemamalini, working for IT leisure in Singapore. Since I was in company when received the mail, I couldn't answer immediately. If I understand the question right, it is about inputting Unicode texts especially Tamil in phpMyAdmin.

PhpMyAdmin's default characterset is iso-8859-1 and so if we enter anything in the form, browser will convert it into numerical html entities. Say for example, if we enter தமிழ் and submit the form, it will convert it to & #2980;& #2990;& #3007;& #2996;& #3021;. Because of this browser's behavior, it will be difficult to store the Unicode text as it is.

Solutions

Immediate solution I could think of is changing or forcing the browser's character encoding into utf-8. In Mozilla Firefox, it can be set via View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8)

Another elegant solution might be changing the phpMyAdmin configurations so that it sends and sets proper charset in Content-Type header as Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
To do this, we have to edit the config.inc.php file found at phpMyAdmin's root directory:
$cfg['DefaultCharset'] = 'utf-8'; and
$cfg['AllowAnywhereRecoding'] = true;
These change of configurations should send proper headers. Anyhow, if the lang cookie is already set to some other charset, it won't reflect the changes. So, one may need to clear the cookies to see the changes.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I edit the config.inc.php file to this,
$cfg['DefaultCharset'] = 'utf-8'; and
$cfg['AllowAnywhereRecoding'] = true;
But i am getting error stating "Can not load iconv
or
recode extension needed for charset conversion,
configure php to allow using these extensions or
disable charset conversion in phpMyAdmin."
what is the solution for this.
I am using windows XP and php,v 2.8.2.1
thanks in advance
Hema
Dec 17, 2004, 2:33:00 PM
R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah said…
Hema, as the error message says it couldn't load the iconv extension, as it is not enabled. You can enable and disable PHP extensions via php.ini configuration file.

Use phpinfo() function to find the path of php.ini file.
To enable the iconv extension, just uncomment the line ;extension=php_iconv.dll (that is just remove the leading semicolon ";") in php.ini
You may need to restart Apache for the changes to reflect. Again use phpinfo() to see if the module is enabled or not. Now, you're done.

This procedure applies to any PHP extensions on Windows.
Dec 17, 2004, 11:24:00 PM
Anonymous said…
Do you have to use phpMyAdmin? I would write a simple PHP script to accept the input correclty and post to the db. The other solutions sound like more work.
Jan 31, 2005, 11:30:00 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stampede and the "Dirty" "Dark" Crowd

Actor Ajith Kumar’s recent interview has sparked quite a few conversations on social media. The part that caught my attention, was his take on crowds. About 30 years ago, when I first joined a college in Madurai after growing up in other places, I experienced a few cultural shocks. Perhaps these weren’t unique to Madurai, but that’s where I first noticed them. One major thing that stood out was the behavior of crowds. For instance, if you suddenly see people rushing to board a bus, chances are there’s a pickpocket in action. During one of Madurai's annual festivals, I noticed some young men carrying water bags — not to distribute water, but to spill it on women, often on their chests. Shockingly, this was almost normalized; parents would quietly tolerate it to avoid public embarrassment, walking a little farther behind the crowd. When some women happened to witness this, they would just shoo the boys away instead of confronting them. The crowd, in such cases, became a kind of...
Post a Comment
Read more

IP to ISP/Country/City (GeoIP) using PHP

I've noted that many people are searching here about how to find out City/Country/ISP details from IP; often referred as GeoIP. Here, I've compiled my replies that once I posted to comp.lang.php Get the IP Refer http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml and see which whois server should be used for the whois lookup Now, do the whois lookup. e.g., whois -h whois.apnic.net 61.x.x.x Parse the results. AFAIK, it will have the ISP, City and Country info For whois lookup, may use rwhois protocol through below PHP code: <?php function whois($host, $command) { $fp = fsockopen ($host, 43, $errno, $errstr, 100); if (!$fp) { $result = $errstr . $errno . "\n"; } else { fputs ($fp, $command . "\r\n\r\n"); $result = ''; while (!feof($fp)) { $result .= fgets ($fp, 128); } fclose ($fp); } return $result; } //debug... echo whois('whois.internic.net', 'php.net'); ?> Re...
Post a Comment
Read more

.fig extension used by Figma software - source of confusion

Recently one of our customers sent design files in fig format (with .fig extension). As .fig is an extension used by famous old Linux design tool Xfig , we tried to open in it and were getting errors. And then the designer came to rescue and informed about the online tool Figma . Figma provides easy prototyping options for lazy aka productive designers. In my opinion, it is somewhat comparable to Pingendo . It is more of an online tool developed in JavaScript. They also provide desktop version / downloadable software. I'd thought that its performance will be better in desktop tool, but noted that it is only an Electron app.
Post a Comment
Read more