mysql_stat> <mysql_select_db
Last updated: Fri, 24 Feb 2012

mysql_set_charset

(PHP 5 >= 5.2.3)

mysql_set_charset — Sets the client character set

Descrição

bool mysql_set_charset ( string $charset [, resource $link_identifier = NULL ] )

Sets the default character set for the current connection.

Parâmetros

charset

A valid character set name.

link_identifier

A conexão MySQL. se o identificador de conexão não for especificado, a ultima conexão aberta por mysql_connect() é assumida. Se uma conexão assim não for encontrada, ela irá tentar criar uma como se a função mysql_connect() fosse chamada sem argumentos. Se uma conexão não for encontrada ou estabelecida, um aviso de nível de erro E_WARNING é gerado.

Valor Retornado

Retorna TRUE em caso de sucesso ou FALSE em falhas.

Notas

Nota:

This function requires MySQL 5.0.7 or later.

Nota:

This is the preferred way to change the charset. Using mysql_query() to execute SET NAMES .. is not recommended.

Veja Também



mysql_stat> <mysql_select_db
Last updated: Fri, 24 Feb 2012
 
User Contributed Notes
mysql_set_charset
kraikkonen85 at yahoo dot com
30-Nov-2010 07:39
Besides setting mysql_set_charset and adding utf8 setting metadata to html, another important but "unpredictable" reason is the encoding type of your PHP editor when saving. For example, if you save the php file other than encodings such as "unicode" or "ANSI", as i experienced, you may notice weird chars like squares, question marks etc.

To make sure, try "save as" method to see explictly that your php file is being saved as utf8.

Hope someone gets help from that, like Ronald stated previously.

Onur
petersealy at aol dot com
07-Apr-2009 06:25
Having just spent 24 hours banging my head against character sets, explicitly setting all my MySQL databases and tables to utf-8, using mysql_set_charset(), and *still* not solving my character display problems, I'll just remind you that htmlentities() now also takes an optional argument to specify the character set, and that *also* needs to be set to "utf-8" to avoid grief.
humanclock dot com
01-Apr-2009 11:25
Be careful when working with multiple databases via the same user/host that you specify "true" as the fourth argument to mysql_connect(), otherwise when you call this function it will set both db connections to the same character set.

If you don't pass in "true" to mysql_connect() in the example below, $link1 and $link2 will have the same resource id# and both database connections will end up being set to utf-8 charsets.

<?php
$link1 = mysql_connect('localhost','user1','pass1',TRUE);
$link2 = mysql_connect('localhost','user1','pass1',TRUE);

mysql_selectdb('db1',$link1);
mysql_selectdb('db2',$link2);

mysql_set_charset('latin1',$link1);
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$link2);
?>
Ashus
20-Oct-2008 12:56
I needed to access the database from within one particular webhosting service. Pages are UTF-8 encoded and data received by forms should be inserted into database without changing the encoding. The database is also in UTF-8.

Neither SET character set 'utf8' or SET names 'utf8' worked properly here, so this workaround made sure all variables are set to utf-8.

<?php

// ... (creating a connection to mysql) ...

mysql_query("SET character_set_results = 'utf8', character_set_client = 'utf8', character_set_connection = 'utf8', character_set_database = 'utf8', character_set_server = 'utf8'", $conn);

$re = mysql_query('SHOW VARIABLES LIKE "%character_set%";')or die(mysql_error());
while ($r = mysql_fetch_assoc($re)) {var_dump ($r); echo "<br />";} exit;

?>

All important variables are now utf-8 and we can safely use INSERTs or SELECTs with mysql_escape_string($var) without any encoding functions.
Ronald
05-Oct-2008 10:33
I need to revoke most of my post below. What I found out afterwards is this:

1. if you do not use mysql_set_char mysql will NOT do any translations and thus store a utf8-character-byte as is. If you then retrieve this byte from the db and output it in a utf8 page it will show just fine BUT if other apps query this byte (expecting to find a latin1 byte) they will go wrong.

2. the 'bug' mentioned before only occurs if you use a ucase or lcase function in your statement (like: latin1_col = ucase('utf8 string')

Hope this helps, Ronald
Ronald
24-Sep-2008 09:42
I just hope that the text below will help someone who is struggling with charset encoding, specially when php-charset is different from the mysql-charset. Let me add that I really think that the php man-pages on the mysql-functions are lacking a lot of details on this important issues. Could someone add some useful text here?

Here is my situation. PHP5.2.4, MySql 4.1.15. A php web-application fully utf-8 encoded and a mysql database in latin1 charset.

To make this work I had to:

1. create and store all code files (php, html, inc, js, etc) in the utf-8 charset. Your editor should have an option for this, if not dump it.

2. check that your editor does not add a BOM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte-order_mark) at the beginning of the file. Use a hex-editor to detect them if needed.

3. Set your apache environment to utf-8 by adding 'AddDefaultCharset utf-8' to your .htaccess. If you do not use apache add 'default_charset utf-8' to your php.ini. You have to do either of them (not both), php will use the apache setting where needed.

4. Additionally add this meta-tag to your html-header: '<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />'. This will help silly browsers (Oeps, IE again?) that ignore the utf-response-header send to them.

5. Check that the above line are listened to by check the 'page info' of your pages in firefox. It should show 2 (!!) utf-8 entries.

======== all of the above sofar has nothing to do with mysql ;-) ======

6. Do *NOT* (repeat NOT!) set the 'names' (set names *) or _ANY_ 'character set' (set character set *) (opposed to what they tell you on these pages).

7. Check the previous item by listing the results of the mysql query 'SHOW session VARIABLES'. All char_sets here should say 'latin1', except for the system one which is always 'utf8'. All collations should say 'latin1_*'. Furthermore the php function mysql_client_encoding() should also return latin1 (though I don't understand why; what does this value mean, I would think if php (being the client) is utf8 encoded this would be utf8?)

8 Finally test the above by storing this string in your db and output it in your webpage: 'Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn and €'.

Now what was interesting during testing and debugging of the above findings was:
1. If I would run 'mysql_set_charset('utf8')' _OR_ 'mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");' and then run a query in which I would have 'where char_column = 'abc''it would die with 'Illegal mix of collations'

2. If I would run 'mysql_query("SET character_set_client = 'utf8';"); mysql_query("SET character_set_result = 'utf8';")' the query would work BUT the non-ascii-characters would show scrambled in the browser.

3. BUT these 2 points above work just fine on my local dev-machine (php 5.2.3 & mysql 5.0.45)!!!!!!!!

This draws me to these 3 conclusions:

1. The Php-mysql-function library (5.2.+) does a fine job translating utf-8 queries & results to/from latin1! It's better to let php handle this for you then to have mysql do this.

2. Mysql (4.0.+) has 1 or more bugs (well, let's say unfinished features) that involve the charset-translations that are solved in 5.0.+.

3. It is not well enough documented! (Otherwise I would have to write this)

One last remark: clearly characters that exist in utf8 and not in latin1 (and vv.) will get lost during utf8-latin1-utf8 translation.

If any of the above is not correct or not complete feel free to correct this! (Or better yet, add a chapter to the php manual :-)

Cheers, Ronald
nabeelmoidu at gmail dot com
08-Jun-2008 07:11
Here's an example of how to use this feature :

I'm using  PHP 5.2.5 from http://oss.oracle.com/projects/php/

I wanted to store arabic characters as UTF8 in the database and as suggested in many of the google results, I tried using

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

and

mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET utf8 ");

but it did not work.

Using the following, it worked flawlessly

$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'user', 'password');
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$link);

Once this is set we need not manually encode the text into utf using utf8_encode() or other functions. The arabic ( or any UTF8 supported ) text can be passed directly to the database and it is automatically converted by PHP.
For eg.
<?php
$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'user', 'password');
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$link);
$db_selected = mysql_select_db('emp_feedback', $link);
if (!$db_selected) { die ('Database access error : ' . mysql_error());}
$query = "INSERT INTO feedback ( EmpName, Message ) VALUES ('$_empName','$_message')";
mysql_query($query) or die('Error, Feedback insert into database failed');
?>
Note that here $_empName is stored in English while $_message is in Arabic.
vljubovic AT smartnet DOT ba
03-Mar-2008 09:22
Using the function provided by Janez and nag worked fine for SELECTs, but with INSERT and UPDATE the non-ascii characters got converted into question marks. To fix this, I replaced SET CHARACTER SET with SET NAMES (ref: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-connection.html). So the function becomes:

<?php
 if (function_exists('mysql_set_charset') === false) {
     /**
      * Sets the client character set.
      *
      * Note: This function requires MySQL 5.0.7 or later.
      *
      * @see http://www.php.net/mysql-set-charset
      * @param string $charset A valid character set name
      * @param resource $link_identifier The MySQL connection
      * @return TRUE on success or FALSE on failure
      */
     function mysql_set_charset($charset, $link_identifier = null)
     {
         if ($link_identifier == null) {
             return mysql_query('SET NAMES "'.$charset.'"');
         } else {
             return mysql_query('SET NAMES "'.$charset.'"', $link_identifier);
         }
     }
 }
 ?>
Anonymous
10-Feb-2008 07:03
Actually, this function is available in client libraries in MySQL 4.1.13 and newer, too.  So the real version requirement is MySQL >= 5.0.7 OR, if you're using MySQL 4, then >= 4.1.13.
nag QWE svgfr RTY org
17-Dec-2007 05:47
Here's an improved version of Janez R.'s function:
<?php
if (function_exists('mysql_set_charset') === false) {
    /**
     * Sets the client character set.
     *
     * Note: This function requires MySQL 5.0.7 or later.
     *
     * @see http://www.php.net/mysql-set-charset
     * @param string $charset A valid character set name
     * @param resource $link_identifier The MySQL connection
     * @return TRUE on success or FALSE on failure
     */
    function mysql_set_charset($charset, $link_identifier = null)
    {
        if ($link_identifier == null) {
            return mysql_query('SET CHARACTER SET "'.$charset.'"');
        } else {
            return mysql_query('SET CHARACTER SET "'.$charset.'"', $link_identifier);
        }
    }
}
?>
Janez R.
03-Sep-2007 10:23
I assume that this is an equivalent in previous versions of php (add some parameter validation and default values though!):
<?
if (!function_exists('mysql_set_charset')) {
  function mysql_set_charset($charset,$dbh)
  {
    return mysql_query("set names $charset",$dbh);
  }
}
?>

mysql_stat> <mysql_select_db
Last updated: Fri, 24 Feb 2012