how to show greek letters

Hi all,
I'm having trouble trying to enter/retrieve Greek characters.
I have an astronomical dbase in MySQL. As you may know, lots of sky objects have Greek letter names (alpha Centauri, etc) but I want to enter these - and have the user see them - as the actual greek characters. Copying and pasting from character map doesn't work (if I copy the greek letter gamma, when I paste it into the field in PHPMyAdmin it comes out as "g" and likewise when the query is executed on the web page through PHP). Setting the field type to "Binary" and entering 0x65 causes the field on the web page to be blank.
I have set the collation for utf-8 in PHPMyAdmin, and the charset to utf-8 on the web page.
I need those Greek letters!
Cheers,
Starman

Sep 24 '07 #1

Follow Post Reply

16762

Atli

5,058

Expert 4TB

Hi Starman.

If your database is set to use UTF-8 this must be a problem with your PHP script.

Are you using any functions on the string before you output them? Like the htmlentities() function, for example, will assume the string is ISO-8859-1 unless you specify the charset.

If you could show us the code, we could help you spot the problem, if it is there.

Sep 24 '07 #2

pbmods

5,821

Expert 4TB

Heya, Starman.

What's your connection encoding?

Try adding these lines just after you connect to your MySQL database:

Expand|Select|Wrap|Line Numbers

 
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $dbConn);

mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'", $dbConn);

where $dbConn is your MySQL connection resource.

Sep 25 '07 #3

starman

Heya, Starman.

What's your connection encoding?

Try adding these lines just after you connect to your MySQL database:

Expand|Select|Wrap|Line Numbers

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $dbConn);

mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'", $dbConn);

where $dbConn is your MySQL connection resource.

Hi,
Thanks for your quick reply! This is the page coding (it's just a trial page at the moment). The include file works as it's supposed to, so I don't think the problem lies there. It holds the dbConnect function. 'Close' is the name of the table (I've just had a thought - could "close" be a reserved word somewhere?)
[PHP]<?php
include('connection.inc.php');
$conn = dbConnect();
mysql_query("set names 'utf8'", $conn);
mysql_query("set character set 'utf8'", $conn);
$sql = "select * from close";
$res = mysql_query($sql) or die (mysql_error());
$numrows = mysql_num_rows($res);
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<p>A total of <?php echo $numrows; ?> records.</p>
<table width=100%>
<?php
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($res))
{
?>
<tr>
<td><?php echo $row['name']; ?></td>
<td><?php echo $row['constellation']; ?></td>
</tr>
<?php } ?>
</body>
</html>[/PHP]

Sep 26 '07 #4

starman

Hi again,
Just to say I've solved the problem! My particular solution is actually quite complicated, since the circumstances are not simply one-for-one; sometimes, a greek letter will need to be followed by a number as well, and I need roman letters and numbers too! However, if anyone needs a simple one-to-one conversion function, I can easily adapt (i.e., vastly simplify) my existing oneinto a "switch" process using PHP. If you're interested, drop me a line at:
[removed]

Sep 27 '07 #5

pbmods

5,821

Expert 4TB

Heya, Starman.

For your protection, I have removed your email address from your post.

Glad to hear you got it working! Good luck with your project, and if you ever need anything, post back anytime :)

Sep 28 '07 #6

starman

Just to say "Thanks" everyone who helped! Much appreciated.

Sep 28 '07 #7

Post your reply

Similar topics