Whcih character ste to set for Persian/Arabix/Fharsi language

[its_joe]

Hello,

We have one database but it is showing ??? ??? marks.

Client of the database is saying that he is inserting arabic / Persian / Farsi characters in the database.

So what is the appropriate collision can be set for the database so that the error is solved and we don't see ???? ???? for the page.

Thank You.

its_joe

 

[cPanelKenneth]

The data is being transformed by MySQL into the latin1 character set, which is the default if nothing is explicitly set. First thing to do is verify the data in the database is still in Arabic/Farsi. If it is, then you need do somethign like:

ALTER TABLE `tbl_name` CHARACTER SET utf-8;

Make certain the database is fully backed up before doing this.

Verifying the data is correect before doign the conversion can be annoying, especially since PHPMyAdmin the the CLI mysql client will both transform any result set into the default character set used for the connection, which again is usually latin1. Youn can find a lot of information regarding this in the MySQL manual.

 

[casey]

Alternatively, add

init-connect=SET NAMES binary

to /etc/my.cnf under [mysqld]

That should fix the display problems.

 

[casey]

See
http://forums.cpanel.net/showthread.php?t=34055&page=3&highlight=init-connect+SET

 

[cPanelKenneth]

Be warned that the above advice causes problems with PHPMyAdmin.

Edit:

That is, the advice about init-connect

 

[cPanelDavidG]

Agreed, usually these issues are more a matter of using the correct character set than anything. Having worked on Greek-language websites myself, I can identify with the complete headache that is getting everything on the correct character set.

UTF-8 is your friend

If things check out with the database, and the site is still showing question marks, change the coding of the page to UTF-8. Also wouldn't hurt to download the page into a text editor and in Save-As, select UTF-8 as the character encoding, so everything matches

 

[casey]

Be warned that the above advice causes problems with PHPMyAdmin.

Edit:

That is, the advice about init-connect

But it fixes the problem with the website without any worries about corrupting data. It is, of course, the quick solution. The ultimate solution as touched on by DavidG is mentioned in the referenced thread. For easier reference it is:

mysqldump -uUSER -pPASSWORD database > database.sql
replace 'old charset' 'newcharset' -- database.sql
mysql -uUSER -pPASSWORD database < database.sql

(mysqldump should be set to "default-character-set=binary" in /etc/my.cnf before doing the above)