Problem displaying Japanese charset (UTF-8) in PHP

[bissatch70]

Hi,

I want to store English and Japanese in a database table which I have managed to achieve by setting the database to UTF-8 (supports both). When I check the table in phpmyadmin the Japanese is there. However, when I extract the Japanese data using a PHP script and display it in the browser it comes out as ???????????????????? - is this because the apache/php server is not set as UTF-8? I have been able to set this in my apache.conf file on my local server on my PC but I doubt I'll have such control from a hosting server which I understand. Is there any method to allow me to display these characters? Can this be set from the x10 cpanel? Or even the PHP script?

Cheers
Bizt

[descalzo]

I've seen plenty of blogs, forums, etc hosted here in non-Western character sets. They all use the same Apache + PHP+MySQL you do.

[nakama]

I have the same problem.

[fomalhaut]

Hello

Have you insert this meta tag in your html script ?

<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />

[tcp_udp12]

At first, you must set character set in database connection before any SELECT, UPDATE or INSERT query

mysql_query( 'SET NAMES utf8' ); 

then, your site must send data in UTF-8:
encoding of the source files must be UTF-8
and site must send header which inform browser to display your site in UTF-8

<?php
header('content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
?>

or

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

[John Rambo]

It's a database problem.
Generally one should choose proper charset/collation (utf8/utf8_general_ci) for databases/tables.
If a table has wrong charset/collation you will get questions (????)when you want to write something in it.

In your case it seems you have right charset/collation for tables, as when you see data in pma it's ok. So you should use query, mentioned above to set charset, every time before other queries.