php - There are symbols like  and so on in database, what to do?

Question

I have a few symbols in my description like ? a € and so on. Can I do anything about it? Or if it's in database, I can't do nothing now?

Answer 1

It sort of depends what the problem actually is...

If it's that those characters are supposed to be there (such as "Ma?ana" in Spanish) then you'll need to ensure everything is in UTF-8... the best way is to:

1: check the database tables are in "utf-8" encoding (if not convert them to utf-8)

2: as Martin noted, ensure the database connector is utf-8 using something like:

mysql_set_charset('utf8'); //note that MySQL uses no hyphen here

3: ensure the the document is utf-8 (you can add a header at the top)

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

4: just to be on the safe side, add it in as a meta tag as well

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

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HOWEVER

It's quite possible you've got some duff characters in the database where something like ISO-8859-1 has been juggled to UTF-8, badly. In this case you'll notice things like ?￡ where what you actually want is ￡ (because UTF-8 characters contain more data than ISO-8859-1 characters, that extra data can become an additional character if you're not careful).

In which case your best bet is to clean the database (you could probably do something like UPDATE table SET field = REPLACE(field, '?￡', '￡') for common "errors") and then convert the whole kaboodle to UTF-8 (as outlined above) to avoid the problem recurring.