SUMMARY
This discussion addresses the issue of displaying Chinese characters from a MySQL database using PHP, where characters appear as question marks. The user confirmed the database encoding is set to gbk_chinese_ci, but the characters still do not display correctly. Key solutions include ensuring the correct character set is set in PHP using commands like set character_set_connection=gbk, character_set_result=gbk and setting the content type in the HTML header. The problem may stem from the MySQL data type, PHP handling, or HTML display settings.
PREREQUISITES
- Understanding of MySQL character sets, specifically gbk and utf-8
- Familiarity with PHP database interactions and the mysql_query function
- Knowledge of HTML content-type headers
- Basic troubleshooting skills for encoding issues in web applications
NEXT STEPS
- Research how to set character sets in MySQL queries, specifically
SET NAMES 'gbk' and SET CHARACTER SET 'gbk'
- Learn about PHP's
mb_convert_encoding function for handling different character encodings
- Explore the use of
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); in PHP scripts
- Investigate the differences between MySQL data types for storing text, such as VARCHAR, TEXT, and BLOB
USEFUL FOR
This discussion is beneficial for web developers, particularly those working with PHP and MySQL, who need to handle multilingual data, especially Chinese characters, in their applications.