Comments on: Funny characters, Webservices and UTF8

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:53:31 +0000

Unicode has a variety of encoding methods of which utf-8 is extreemly common. Some people think that utf-16 is unicode and that’s all there is. Wrong, utf-16 is used a lot on windows like sql server because the 2 bytes is more manageable. utf-8 is much cooler because it uses a variable byte count (1-3 bytes) depending on the 8th bit of the first byte. So, regular ascii strings are stored as one byte per character (with bit 7 off) however the minute you get a fancy character bit 8 is turned on and another byte will follow with the details. But utf-8, utf-16, are flavours of the same concept – there is no need for special language encodings because all languages are handled in the one encoding.

By: Fesh

Fesh — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:13:43 +0000

Thanks for that solution Pavel…worked perfect.

By: Laurents C. R. Meyer

Laurents C. R. Meyer — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:04:07 +0000

Successfully used the “Pavel Benisek Solution”. Works great.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:28:12 +0000

UTF-8 is not Unicode… Unicode is also known as UTF-16 and every character is 2 bytes. UTF-8 is a mix/stop-gap between ASCII and Unicode where characters can very between 1-3 bytes.

By: Pavel Benisek

Pavel Benisek — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:38:13 +0000

I was having this problem while the MySQL Client’s encoding was set to latin1. Solved by setting it to utf8 solved the problem.

mysql_set_charset( ‘utf8′, $this->DB ) or die (“ERROR: Unable to set Client’s character set”);

Pavel

By: FOXXFiles

FOXXFiles — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:39:28 +0000

You can save the database on sqlscript, remove the collate command, recode sqlscript and restore database. its work.

By: mxcd

mxcd — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:35:25 +0000

Using utf8_encode() on the results will NOT eliminate this problem.
As long as it there are the funny characters, M$ word uses are the problem. (Characters in the above list.)

I had the prob, writing a small cms where users started copying and pasting MSW content – it was hell.

By: Nirav

Nirav — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 13:41:10 +0000

Using utf8_encode() on the results will eliminate this problem. Some other solution that I found on the net (which I have not tried) is to downgrade libxml to 2.6.8.