When computers were still using large black text oriented screens or no screens at all, a computer only knew how to store a limited set of characters. Then it was normal to store a name with the more complicated characters replaced by more basic characters. The ASCII standard was used to make communication between multiple systems (or applications) easier. Storing characters as ASCII needs little space and is quite strait forward.

Then DOS used CP850 and CP437 and so on to make it possible to use language /location specific characters.
Then ISO8859-1, ISO8859-15 and more of these character sets were defined as standard.

And now there is Unicode: UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS2, etc.




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A recent question on a mailing list was the best practices for UTF-8 and PHP/MySQL. The following are the configurations I used in my multi-language projects.

MySQL UTF-8 Configuration

# my.cnf
[mysqld]
default_character_set = utf8
character_set_client       = utf8
character_set_server       = utf8
[client]
default_character_set = utf8

PHP UTF-8 Configuration

#php.ini
default_charset = "utf-8"

Apache UTF-8 Configuration

#httpd.conf
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
<VirtualHost>
    AddCharset UTF-8   .htm
</VirtualHost>

HTML file UTF-8 Configuration

 <meta charset="utf-8">

PHP file UTF-8 Configuration

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

MySQL connection (extra precaution)

SET NAMES utf8;

Shell UTF-8

And last

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Having reviewed different table structures designed by different people, I have come to the conclusion that binary and non-binary string data types are used without consideration of the consequences of choosing either one. The confusion stems from the fact that both non-binary and binary string data appear to store characters because they can be saved as quoted string.

Background Knowledge

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The MySQL database (http://www.mysql.com/) v4.0.23 is using the default character set of “Latin1″. When the database was created I had no knowledge of character sets other wise it would have been “UTF-8″.
The web pages are using a character set of “UTF-8″.

Problem

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Data being queried from a MySQL database (http://www.mysql.com/) that contains French accent characters will not render correctly in the browser even after applying PHP htmlentities().

Example code: $string = htmlentities($string , ENT_QUOTES, “UTF-8″);

Solution

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The queried data from the database was inputted using the

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