Viewing topic: Messed-up characters in the school directory

Er... I meant to do that, honest... no, actually, I didn't.

As part of the process of revamping the site I'm changing everything to a different character encoding. Unfortunately something has gone slightly awry.

Not to worry, everything is backed up and safe and will all be shipshape shortly!

Probably nobody's even noticed - half of the visitors will just think the nonsense characters are Russian

Panic over - after about 5 hours of slaving away I finally got it to work.

Conclusion - MySQL and UTF-8 aren't the most fun combination to work with.

The database has been repaired and everything will be looking normal by Friday. I promise

For anyone who's interested, the problem was partly in the fact that the phpMyAdmin on my server doesn't seem to like utf-8 at all. A bit of Googling showed that I'm not alone with the problem. The solution: take an earlier dump of the database and by a process of elimination, search and replace the nonsense characters for their correct Cyrillic equivalents.

That was fun, but not all - it wouldn't go into the database as UTF-8 by importing through myAdmin. The hosting company seems to have turned off mysqldump and associated features, leaving me with only one option to get the data stored as UTF-8 (well, there were others, probably, but this was what I came up with) - take the dump and execute it as a series of mysql_queries in .php files saved as UTF-8.

A bit extreme, but it worked! I'm off to bed now, as it is almost 7am and I have to work today

poor Bob =)
student's site still doesn't look good

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Yes I still get funny script (and yes, I can read Russian), in spite of messing with my 'view' submenu for ages.

Can you send me a URL to one/some of the pages that are showing up weird?

It *should* all be UTF-8...

Ah, I think you've sorted out the problem. All the school listings now appear in cyrillic and not the mad P_P language, and it works under Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. (You must be burning the midnight and early morning oil.)

I've used Mysql with PHP and with Java, but fortunately not incorporating cyrillic.

Yeah, generally there are no problems with non-latin as long as the encoding on pages with forms for input to MySQL is the same as on those that display the output. No matter what character set MySQL is set to, what goes in should come out the same, although it may be stored in a pretty weird way.

So weird things happened when I changed the site page encoding to UTF-8