Convert arabic / japanese to mySQL in php?

Question

There are foreign characters in my mySQL database that are Arabic or Japanese,

تظاهرات در خیابان آذربایجان

and they look great in phpMyAdmin (db utf8_general_ci db column structure), but when I try to repeat them from mySQL query, I get ???. Since I am rewriting this back to an AJAX request, how do I send characters back to go through the encoding?

Thanks from a very confused international student.

Answer 1

It can be one or both of these problems:

The output encoding is not set correctly. Put this in your .php file (at the top, before sending any output):

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8"); 

Your database connection / communication encoding (not quite sure what to call) is not set up correctly. Put this after you connect to the database, but before retrieving any data:

 mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8'); // (or equivalent) 

This ensures that communication between php and mysql is also done in utf8.