How to check utf-8 encoding in mysql
Googling around just finds instructions for changing from one format to another, but I can't seem to find how exactly to make sure which of these I have first. Show
How can I:
wittich 1,9412 gold badges21 silver badges44 bronze badges asked May 23, 2011 at 22:07
GeekedOutGeekedOut 16.5k36 gold badges104 silver badges182 bronze badges 1 You can use information_schema in order to know the engine of each table.
For the encoding you can use
or, even better
Kirby 14.5k8 gold badges86 silver badges100 bronze badges answered May 23, 2011 at 22:09
Nicola CossuNicola Cossu 52.9k15 gold badges91 silver badges96 bronze badges 5 As a MySQL or PHP developer, once you step beyond the comfortable confines of English-only character sets, you quickly find yourself entangled in the wonderfully wacky world of UTF-8 encoding. A Quick UTF-8 Primer Unicode is a widely-used computing industry standard that defines a comprehensive mapping of unique numeric code values to the characters in most of today’s written character sets to aid with system interoperability and data interchange. UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding that can represent every character in the Unicode character set. It was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII and to avoid the complications of endianness and byte order marks in UTF-16 and UTF-32. UTF-8 has become the dominant character encoding for the World Wide Web, accounting for more than half of all Web pages. UTF-8 encodes each character using one to four bytes. The first 128 characters of Unicode correspond one-to-one with ASCII, making valid ASCII text also valid UTF-8-encoded text. It is for this reason that systems that are limited to use of the English character set are insulated from the complexities that can otherwise arise with UTF-8. For example, the Unicode hexidecimal code for the letter A is U+0041, which in UTF-8 is simply encoded with the single byte 41. In comparison, the Unicode hexidecimal code for the character is U+233B4, which in UTF-8 is encoded with the four bytes F0 A3 8E B4.On a previous job, we began running into data encoding issues when displaying bios of artists from all over the world. It soon became apparent that there were problems with the stored data, as sometimes the data was correctly encoded and sometimes it was not. This led programmers to implement a hodge-podge of patches, sometimes with JavaScript, sometimes with HTML charset meta tags, sometimes with PHP, and so on. Soon, we ended up with a list of 600,000 artist bios with double- or triple-encoded information, with data being stored in different ways depending on who programmed the feature or implemented the patch. A classical technical rat’s nest. Indeed, navigating through UTF-8 data encoding issues can be a frustrating and hair-pulling experience. This post provides a concise cookbook for addressing these UTF-8 issues when working with PHP and MySQL in particular, based on practical experience and lessons learned (and with thanks, in part, to information discovered here and here along the way). Specifically, we’ll cover the following in this post:
PHP UTF-8 Encoding – modifications to your php.ini file:The first thing you need to do is to modify your
(Note: You can subsequently use OK cool, so now PHP and UTF-8 should work just fine together. Right? Well, not exactly. In fact, not even close. While this change will ensure that PHP always outputs UTF-8 as the character encoding (in browser response Content-type headers), you still need to make a number of modifications to your PHP code to make sure that it properly processes and generates UTF-8 characters. PHP UTF-8 Encoding – modifications to your code:To be sure that your PHP code plays well in the UTF-8 data encoding sandbox, here are the things you need to do:
MySQL UTF-8 Encoding – modifications to your my.ini file:On the MySQL/UTF-8 side of things, modifications to the
MySQL UTF-8 Encoding – other things to consider:
MySQL UTF-8 Encoding – if you use Sphinx:
Migrating database data that is already encoded in latin1 to UTF-8If you have an existing MySQL database that is already encoded in latin1, here’s how to convert the latin1 to UTF-8:
Source code and resource filesOne other thing to remember and verify is that your source code files, resources files, and so on, are all being saved properly with UTF-8 data encoding. Otherwise, any “special” characters in these files may not be handled correctly. In Netbeans, for example, you can right-click on your project, choose properties and then in “Sources” you will find the data encoding option (it usually defaults to UTF-8, but it’s worth checking). Or in Windows Notepad, use the “Save As…” option in the File menu, and select the UTF-8 encoding option at the bottom of the dialog. (Note that the “Unicode” option that Notepad provides is actually UTF-16, so that’s not what you want.) Wrap-upAlthough it can be somewhat tedious, taking the time to go through these steps to systematically address your MySQL and PHP UTF-8 data encoding issues can ultimately save you a great deal of time and grief. In the long run, this type of methodical approach is far superior to the all-too-common tendency to just keep patching the system. This guide hopefully emphasizes the importance of taking the charset definition into consideration when setting up a project environment in the first place and working in a software project environment that properly accounts for character encoding in its manipulation of text and strings. Further Reading on the Toptal Engineering Blog:
How can I get UTFFour good steps to always get correctly encoded UTF-8 text:. Run this query before any other query: mysql_query("set names 'utf8'");. Add this to your HTML head: . Add this at top of your PHP code:. Does MySQL use UTFMySQL supports multiple Unicode character sets: utf8mb4 : A UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set using one to four bytes per character.
How do I find the charset of a table in MySQL?MySQL Server supports multiple character sets, including several Unicode character sets. To display the available character sets, use the INFORMATION_SCHEMA CHARACTER_SETS table or the SHOW CHARACTER SET statement.
How do I save a UTFHow to store UTF8 characters in MySQL. Check Character Set. Open terminal and run the following command replacing username below with your database username. ... . Change Character Set to UTF8. Open my.cnf file in terminal $ sudo vi /etc/my.cnf. ... . Restart MySQL Server. ... . Convert MySQL database to UTF8.. |