This section describes how to fetch Chinese text from MySQL database and send it to a Web page through Apache in UTF-8 encoding.
To fix the problem I had in the previous test, I decided to:
Tell MySQL to deliver characters from database to PHP in UTF-8 encoding by set MySQL
session variable character_set_results=utf8.
Tell the Web browser to display characters in UTF-8 encoding by set HTML document header meta tag
"Content-Type" to "text/html; charset=utf-8".
Here is the new test PHP script that changes MySQL and HTML document settings to display Chinese characters in UTF-8
encoding:
<?php #MySQL-Web-Chinese-UTF8.php
# Copyright (c) 2007 by Dr. Herong Yang, http://www.herongyang.com/
#
$con = mysql_connect("localhost", "Herong", "TopSecret");
$ok = mysql_select_db("HerongDB", $con);
$test_name = "Moving Chinese Text from Database to Web";
print('<html>');
print('<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"'.
' content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>');
print('<body><pre>'."\n");
# Delete the record
$sql = "DELETE FROM Comment_Mixed WHERE Test_Name ='$test_name'";
mysql_query($sql, $con);
print("\nNumber of rows deleted: ".mysql_affected_rows()."\n");
# Build the SQL INSERT statement
$sql = <<<END_OF_MESSAGE
INSERT INTO Comment_Mixed (Test_name, String_ASCII,
String_Latin1, String_UTF8, String_GBK, String_Big5)
VALUES ('$test_name', 'Television',
X'54E96CE9766973696F6E',
X'E794B5E8A786E69CBA2FE99BBBE8A696E6A99F',
X'B5E7CAD3BBFA',
X'B971B5F8BEF7');
END_OF_MESSAGE;
mysql_query($sql, $con);
print("\nNumber of rows inserted: ".mysql_affected_rows()."\n");
# Set character_set_results
mysql_query("SET character_set_results=utf8", $con);
# Fetch text data from database
$sql = "SELECT * FROM Comment_Mixed"
. " WHERE Test_Name = '$test_name'";
$res = mysql_query($sql, $con);
# Send text data output
if ($row = mysql_fetch_array($res)) {
print("\nTest Name = ".$row['Test_Name']."\n");
print(" String_ASCII: ".$row['String_ASCII']."\n");
print(" String_Latin1: ".$row['String_Latin1']."\n");
print(" String_UTF8: ".$row['String_UTF8']."\n");
print(" String_GBK: ".$row['String_GBK']."\n");
print(" String_Big5: ".$row['String_Big5']."\n");
}
mysql_free_result($res);
mysql_close($con);
print('</pre></body></html>');
?>
Now the output is perfect. Chinese characters stored in UTF-8, GBK(GB2312) and Big5 are
all correctly displayed on the Web page:
If you are surprised by the fact that Chinese characters in GBK and Big5 encodings
are also displayed correctly on a Web page with charset=utf-8, read this explanation:
When Chinese characters with GBK encoding from the String_GBK column is returned
in the result set object, MySQL converted them to the equivalent Chinese characters in UTF-8 encoding.
When Chinese characters with Big5 encoding from the String_Big5 column is returned
in the result set object, MySQL converted them to the equivalent Chinese characters in UTF-8 encoding.
MySQL did a good job on converting my GBK and Big5 encoded characters to UTF-8 encoded characters. I am impressed!
