Re: Accented characters

Hi group!

My name is Jacob, I'm re-working a site (calabashmusic.com) which is a 
music download site specializing in music from around the world.  We 
have tie-ups with numerous international parters as well.  The current 
version is Latin-1 encoded, and is only shown in English.  The new one 
will me M17N and will need UTF because we are doing japan.

Anyway, I had the same problem as steve (I think, I've read the entire 
thread).  It was a HASSTLE.  we got a new server after a crash so I 
uploaded my DB dump from the local box onto a fresh mySQL 3.23 and 
Apache 2.  It seemed more or less okay, I didn't test extensively and a 
week later after 10,000 inserts had been made, I realized the accented 
chars were screwed up, and we use about 25 of them (28 to be exact).  So 
I looked in the DB and lo and behold, they were all corrupted and 
replaced with the char combos Steve mentioned.  To be specific it was an 
upper case A with two dots above it followed by another char, usually 
something weird like the Euro or a Cubed exponent.

After Stuggling for much time, I eventually wrote a PHP script to 
traverse the Database, all tables and columns and change these screwy 
chars back to their equivilents which I had to match across simular 
records in my old DB.  I also upgraded to MySQL 4.0.2 because I thought 
this might help.

Now everything seems to be pretty much okay, but I'm still shaking from 
the experience.  I have no idea how it happened, or if I'll repeat it. 
I have MySQL 4.0.2 with latin1, apache with ISO-8859-1 as Default Charset.

Regarding what happened, any ideas?  Regarding the future, how do I set 
up a purely unicode environment, and how do I convert my old data to it?

Thanks
Jacob

Steve wrote:
> I know, I know, you've had this a million times. But I have Googled on this
> and not come up with anything that really matches my problem, so I need
> some advice about refining my search. Here's the situation:
> 
> I have a site using shared hosting which is running Apache 1.3.27, PHP
> 4.1.2. As this is a site about France, accented characters are used a lot,
> but have never been a problem. Some such characters are entered via HTML
> forms on the site, others are in MySQL databases where they have been
> entered on my local system via MySQLcc. The characters are all 'proper'
> characters - ie, they are not stored as HTML entities.
> 
> And that's all working fine. But...
> 
> I'm revamping the site, and on my local system (Apache 2, PHP 4.3.4), where
> I'm doing the development, the exact same databases, using the exact same
> browser (Firefox, FWIW) have problems with accented chars, which are shown
> as a jumble of 2-3 chars.
> 
> Any ideas why there might be this discrepancy? Could it have anything to do
> with the way PHP is installed on the two systems?
> 
> And what is the general recommendation about storing accented characters in
> text fields on MySQL DBs? Convert to htmlentities during the saving?
> Problem with that is that I might need the same databases for generating
> email mail-outs where I'm not using HTML...
> 
> This is a problem I thought I'd solved ages ago, so my head's in a bit of
> spin. Any advice is most welcome.
> 

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