I have a vanilla forum based forum website. Currently customizing it. Before few days it was working fine. I am observing strange characters with data in the database when I save things.
For example if i register a new user using naseem#gmail.com in the database it saves as seem#gmail.com�
naseem is stripped to seem and some strange character at the end of the string.
I cant figure it out. Any kind of help is appreciated.
If you are using the command line/terminal, makes sure you do "SET NAMES UTF8". That will set your connection to mysql to UTF8. This is different than your database being set to UTF8. Also make sure you terminal application itself is set to UTF8.
The diamond question mark is almost always an indication of UTF8 character that isn't being displayed correctly because of encoding settings.
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I feel I'm a bit in over my head on this one. I have developed an ASP.Net MVC website for a friend that allows them to paste in Hebrew words and it does some conversion/translation. I am using MySQL as a data backend with ASP.Net MVC 5.
The website is fairly simple. The database consists of two tables which store letters, and translations. I am using MySQL EF6 for data access layer. There are basically three screens on the website, one for managing each table, and one for doing the translations.
When I run it in my development environment (VS 2017/Windows 10), everything works as expected. I can edit data using the Hebrew Unicode characters and they save properly to the database. Here is an example:
When I click Save, I expect those values to be saved to the database, and they work fine. However, I have recently converted the website to run on a Mono/Ubuntu environment for hosting. I got the environment setup using mod_mono and Apache2. Everything is working perfectly, except when I save a page like this, the Hebrew character א gets converted into a question mark (?):
Here's what I've determined so far.
I know Apache/MySQL is setup properly to handle these values, because the data displays fine. It only gets messed up when I save it.
I am also running PhpMyAdmin on the same server, and when I modify that same row through the table editor, it does not mess up the encoding.
I've tried adding the Default Encoding utf-8 to the Apache configuration with no luck.
I've tried adding globalization with default encodings of utf-8 to web.config and it didn't help.
How do I troubleshoot where the value is getting messed up? Is there a simple solution I need to apply to fix this?
Thanks!
The bytes to be stored are not encoded as utf8/utf8mb4. Fix this.
The column in the database is CHARACTER SET utf8 (or utf8mb4). Fix this.
Also, check that the connection during reading is UTF-8.
HTML forms should start like <form accept-charset="UTF-8">.
For more discussion, see Trouble with utf8 characters; what I see is not what I stored
If that is not enough to solve your problem, find the HEX, as discussed in "Test the data" in that link; then ask for more help.
I have an old site where visitors can add their comments. Until now it always worked well, it doesn't have many visitors (it's for a niche audience). It was built in classic ASP and it's using MySQL (now 5.6). It's running on IIS 8.5 and it connects to the DB without DSN.
Whenever someone adds emoji characters to their posts it'll make the IIS service go into some kind of loop using more than 60% of the CPU and never stops.
I do not want to filter these characters out, I think they fit in well with the site's premise, however I did not foresee this issue. When I first set up MySQL I used UTF-16 to make sure my users could write in any language, and I never had issues until now. There are messages in what looks like Japanese and Korean, and I only figured out it was an issue with Emojis when a user told me what he was doing when the site crashed on him.
All the site's pages/files are saved in Unicode and for all of them the charset is set as "utf-8".
The database's collation is utf16_unicode_ci and so are the tables'.
I can insert Emojis into the tables directly from command line or via HeidiSQL, however....
The server is sending the Emojis as question marks (?).
Here's my connection string:
Driver={MySQL ODBC 5.3 Unicode
Driver};Server=...;User=******;Password=******;Option=3;charset=utf16;
Use CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 end-to-end in MySQL.
I set up a web project on a web server with apparently wrong encoding. But somehow (I really don't know why), we figured how we had to deal with it and the encoding worked for us.
But now we moved the data to a new server with a correctly set up UTF8 database and surprise, the encoding is wrong.
How can we "correct" the data, is there any best practice?
Example
old server: http://www.orat.io/stmt/200
new server: http://www.firefile.net/stmt/200
Thanks a lot!
This actually happens in practice - I've seen it sometimes :-) What usually happens:
database is in utf-8
input/output is in encoding1 - say it is iso-8859-2 (i.e. the meta-charset in HTML)
but, because the previous admin didn't know how to properly set the database connection encoding (this is the charset which is specified using set names SQL command), the database connection is configured as if the input/output is in different encoding2 - say iso-8859-1 - default on many linux systems.
To get the correct data out of the database, you must access it in the same erroneous way as you did before - e.g. for the example above, set iso-8859-1 encoding but in fact get the iso-8859-2. Everything "works" until someone starts to access the database correctly.
You have not provided enough detail about what is encoding1/encoding2 in your case and you probably don't know it. So, either look at the old setup or try to figure out by trial and error.
The easiest way to re-code your database is probably to do mysqldump in encoding2, then claim it's encoding1 (just put the set names encoding1 at the beginning of sql file) and import the database into an empty one by source-ing the sql file. All database fields of course stay in utf-8 all the time.
Be careful and use PHPMyAdmin as an independent tool to see the "real" state of the database. :-) Good luck with this rebus.
In a web application I'm working on all the content seems fine, except for the content which seems to be retrieved from the database. Some special characters are used, and they break - so it's deffinatly a character encoding error somewhere.
When I manually in the browser try to switch from iso-8859-1 to utf-8 the database-content looks fine, but the static is messed up. And vice versa. So I suspect that the static content is iso-8859-1, and the content from the database is utf-8.
I've looked around for some configuration files which states the charset, but when I try changing it, nothing happen.
Will converting my database content to iso-8859-1 help maybe, so it correlates with the static content? In that case, how? I've tried changing the schema and collation but the effect was seamless.
Edit: My apologies. This is an MySQL database.
Maybe it is an issue with your client library that communicates to MySQL.
Before you try to retrieve data from the database, execute this query:
SET NAMES 'utf8'
reference:
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?103,46870,47245#msg-47245
Hope this helps.
I recently deployed my application. For development I used SQLite and everything was right so far. I have a controller which uses Nokogiri to populate data into my database.
The problem is on production I'm using MySQL instead of SQLite and now my script is populating the data with the wrong encoding.
For instance, it writes "Aragón" instead of "Aragón". The MySQL is using utf8 for both the database and every table.
Nokogiri is probably returning things correctly. I suspect you have a mismatch in the character set of the content you are parsing with Nokogiri, and the database.
Your data being parsed might be ISO-8859-1 or WIN-1252, which are the most common on the internet. You'll need to look in the data to see what it is declared as. Also look at the source for the word "Aragón" and see whether it has embedded upper-bit characters, or entity-encoded characters. By looking at the value for the accented characters you can also get an idea when encoding the characters are.
Odds are good they're not UTF8, so when Nokogiri passes them to your code that writes to the database they will be wrong.
To fix the problem you'll need to either tell Nokogiri what the encoding is, or convert the text to UTF-8 before storing it.
You've got the encoding wrong somewhere in your stack. I bet it's set wrong in MySQL.
Take a look at this: I need help fixing Broken UTF8 encoding