Reading Thai characters from MySQL using ASP - mysql

Question

I have Thai characters in MySQL but they don't transfer to my ASP generated web page correctly. I've linked to screen shots of the crucial factors showing the data is OK in the table but not on the website as seen in the last screen shot. Any thoughts what I'm doing wrong?
http://www.transum.com/Temp/ThaiScript.PNG
The first two pictures are from phpMyAdmin
The third picture is the header of my webpage.
The fourth picture shows what appears on the webpage.
I have already added the UTF-8 instruction to the connection:
Conn.execute ("SET NAMES utf8")
SQL = "select * from Phrases WHERE Checked = TRUE Order by English ASC"
set RSrecord = Conn.execute (SQL)
Response.CharSet = "utf-8"

Answer 1

Without seeing more of your source, my first question (or suggestion) is whether you are HTML encoding your output?
Response.Write Server.HTMLEncode(RSrecord.Fields("Thai_Script"))
If this doesn't work for you, can you show a bit more code?

Answer 2

I think I've worked this one out. First of all I should repeat that if you can possibly install MyODBC v5.1 then do so and don't bother trying to configure for 3.51. Unfortunately it would appear that the older driver is all that a certain large and well known web host seems to offer.
Here's a link to a version of my Russian Cyrillic page. It uses the old driver, (MyODBC 3.51)
http://clubdanceholidays.co.uk/aboutusruansi.asp
The crucial points to note are:
1) In the first line:
<%# LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252" LCID="2057" %>
Use 1252 rather than 65001 as your codepage value - I realise just how counterintuitive this is, but in this specific situation it works.
2) Your line
Conn.execute ("SET NAMES utf8")
Adding this query immediately before the query to populate my recordset was the missing piece of the jigsaw for me.
3) The Charset meta tag
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
This should definitely be UTF-8. Essentially we're telling the server that it's a Windows-1252 page and the browser that it's a UTF-8 page.
4) What kind of encoding to use when you save the file
This is a little more complicated. If you're using Notepad then you need to use ANSI. The UTF-8 option is actually UTF-8 + BOM, which seems to create a conflict with the codepage definition in point 1. The problem with ANSI comes if you need to hardcode any non-western characters into your page - you couldn't insert them as they are, you would need to manually encode them first, eg for เครื่องบิน you would need to insert เครื่องบิน
If you have a more powerful editor than Notepad, (I use Editplus - http://www.editplus.com/ - it's not free but it's quite cheap) you may find two UTF-8 options. Choose the one without BOM.