I have a MySQL table with 120,000 lines stored in UTF-8 format. There is one field, product name, that contains text with many accents. I need to fill a second field with this same name after converting it to a url-friendly form (ASCII).
Since PHP doesn't directly handle UTF-8, I'm using:
$value = iconv ('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1', $value);
to convert the name to ISO-8859-1, followed by a massive strstr statement to replace any accented character by its unaccented equivalent (à becomes a, for example).
However, the original text names were entered with smart quotes, and iconv chokes whenever it comes across one -- I get:
Unknown error type: [8]
iconv() [function.iconv]: Detected an illegal character in input string
To get rid of the smart quotes before using iconv, I have tried using three statements like:
$value = str_replace('’', "'", $value);
(’ is the raw value of a UTF-8 smart single quote)
Because the text file is so long, these str_replace's cause the script to time out every single time.
What is the fastest way to strip out the smart quotes (or any invalid characters) from a UTF-8 string, prior to running iconv?
Or, is there an easier solution to this whole problem? What is the fastest way to convert a name with many accents, in UTF-8, to a name with no accents, spelled correctly, in ASCII?
Glibc (and the GNU libiconv) supports //TRANSLIT and //IGNORE suffixes.
Thus, on Linux, this works just fine:
$ echo $'\xe2\x80\x99'
’
$ echo $'\xe2\x80\x99' | iconv -futf8 -tiso8859-1
iconv: illegal input sequence at position 0
$ echo $'\xe2\x80\x99' | iconv -futf8 -tiso8859-1//translit
'
I'm not sure what iconv is in use by PHP, but the documentation implies that //TRANSLIT and //IGNORE will work there too.
What do you mean by "link-friendly"? Only way that makes sense to me, since the text between <a>...</a> tags can be anything, is actually "URL-friendly", similar to SO's URLs where everything is converted to [a-z-].
If that's what you're going for, you'll need a transliteration library, not a character set conversion library. (I've had no luck getting iconv() to do the work in the past, but I haven't tried in a while.) There's a beta PHP extension translit that probably does the job.
If you can't add extensions to your PHP install, you'll have to look for a PHP library that does the same thing. I haven't used it, but the PHP UTF-8 library implements a utf8_to_ascii library that I assume does something like what you need.
(Also, if iconv() is failing like you said, it means that your input isn't actually valid UTF-8, so no amount of replacing valid UTF-8 with anything else will help the problem. EDIT: I may take that back: if ephemient's answer is correct, the iconv error you're seeing may very well be because there's no direct representation of the character in the destination character set. So, nevermind.)
Have you considered using MySQL's REPLACE string function to change the offending strings into apostrophes, or whatever? You may be able to put together the "string to be replaced" part e.g. by using CONCAT on CHAR calls...
Related
I have a perl script that reads from a web service and saves in a mysql table. this table uses latin1. from the web service there are coming some wrong characters and need to remove them before saving them in the database, otherwise they get saved as '?'
wanted to do something similar as:
$desc=~s///gsi;
but is not removing them.
the webservice that has the wrong characters is: https://jobvacancies.services.businesslink.gov.uk:8443/vacancy/26653478
using a user agent to get the data, seems coming in utf8 but the characters need to be removed:
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new ();
$ua->default_headers->push_header ('Accept' =>
"text/html,application/xhtml" .
"+xml,application/xml");
$ua->default_headers->push_header ('Accept-Charset' => "utf-8");
my $doc = $ua->get ("https://jobvacancies.services.businesslink.gov.uk:8443/vacancy/26653478")
If you just want to remove the characters outside the 7-bit ascii set (which are sufficient to display messages in english), you can you do this:
$desc=~s/[^\x00-\x7f]//g
Edit: If you want something more elaborate that supports the entire latin-1 set, you can do this:
use Encode;
$desc=encode('latin-1',$desc,sub {''});
This will remove exactly the characters that cannot be represented by latin-1. Note that this line expects that the utf-8 flag is on for the string $desc and that the resulting string will have the utf-8 flag is off.
Finally, if you want to preserve the euro sign (€), please note that you cannot do that with latin-1 because it is not part of that encoding. You will have to use a different encoding, such as ISO-8859-15.
The content sent by the web service is XML that contains HTML in the Description tag. If this is that content that worries you, another option than deleting non-Latin-1 character is to encode characters using HTML encoding:
$desc =~ s/([^\x00-\x7f])/sprintf("&%d;", ord $1)/ge
Here is an example:
$ echo 'é' | perl -C -pE 's/([^\x00-\x7f])/sprintf("&%d;", ord $1)/ge'
&233;
Change your column definition to CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 so that the naughty character does not need to be removed, and can actually be stored.
I try to import some large csv dataset into neo4j using the neo4j-import tool. Quotation is not used anywhere, and therefore i get errors when parsing using --quote " --quote ' --quote ´ and alike. even choosing very rare unicode chars doesnt help with this multi-gig csv because it also contains arabic letters, math symbols and everything you can imagine.
So: Is there a way to disable the quotation checking completely?
Perhaps it would be useful to have the import tool able to accept character configuration values specifying ASCII codes. If so then you could specify --quote \0 and no character would match. That would also be useful for specifying other special characters in general I'd guess.
You need to make sure the CSV file uses quotation marks, since they allow the tool to reliably determine when strings end.
Any string in your data file might contain the delimiter character (a comma, by default). Even if there were a way to turn off quotation checking, the tool would treat every delimiter character as the end of a field. Therefore, any string field that happened to contain the delimiter character would be terminated prematurely, causing errors.
I have a MySQL 'articles' table and I am trying to make the following insert using SQLyog.
insert into articles (id,title) values (2356606,'Jérôme_Lejeune');
This works fine and the data shows fine when I do a select query.
The problem is that when I do the same insert query through my perl script, the name shows up with some junk characters in place of é and ô in the database. I need to know how to properly store the name through my script. The part of code that does the insert is like this.
$sql_insert = "insert into articles (id,title) values (?,?)";
$sth_insert = $dbh->prepare($sql_insert);
$sth_insert->execute($id,$title);
$id and $title have the correct required data which I have checked by print before I am inserting them. Please assist.
You have opened up the character encoding can of worms, and you have a lot to learn before you will solve this problem and have it stay solved.
You are probably already used to thinking of how a character of text can be encoded as a string of bits. Under the ASCII encoding, for example, the 8-bit string 01000001 (65) is used to indicate the A character. When you start to think about how many different languages there are and how many different kinds of characters there are, you quickly realize that an 8-bit encoding is not going to get you very far. So a number of other character encodings have proliferated. Some of the most popular are latin1 (ISO-8859-1) and UTF-8. Both of these encodings can render the é and ô characters, but they use quite different bit strings to represent them. As you write to a file (or to the terminal) or add a row to a database, Perl and MySQL have a notion of what the character encoding of the output stream is. An encoding is also used when you read data. If you don't know what this encoding is, then it doesn't make any sense to say that the data looks good/looks bad when you store it and retrieve it.
Perl and MySQL can, with the right settings, handle both of these encodings and several more. Which encoding you choose to use is not as important as making sure that all the pieces of your application are using the same encoding. But you should choose an encoding that
can encode all of the characters you will need (for this problem, you mention é and ô, but will there be others? what about in the future?)
is supported by all the pieces of your application (front-end, database, back-end)
Here's some suggested reading to get you headed in the right direction:
The Encode module for Perl
character sets in MySQL
(others should feel free to recommend additional links)
I can't speak to MySQL so much, but character encoding support in Perl is rapidly evolving (which isn't to say that it ain't damn good). The latest versions of Perl will have the best support (for the most obscure character sets) and the best features (for example, regular expressions and character classes) for characters beyond ASCII.
There are few things to follow.
First you have to make sure, that Perl understands that data which is moving between your program and DB is encoded as UTF-8 (i expect your databases and tables are set properly). For this you need to say it loud out on connecting to database, like this:
my($dbh) = DBI->connect(
'dbi:mysql:test',
'user',
'password',
{
mysql_enable_utf8 => 1,
}
);
Next, you need send data to output and you must set it to decaode data as UTF-8. For this i like pretty good module:
use utf8::all;
But this module is not in core, so you may want to set it with binmode yourself too:
binmode STDIN, ":utf8";
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
And if you deal with webpages, you have to make sure, that browser understoods that you are sending your data encoded as UTF-8. For that you should make sure your HTTP-headers include encoding:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8;
and set it with HTML META-tag too:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Now you should get your road covered.
Is the following dangerous?
$ myscript '<somejsoncreatedfromuserdata>'
If so, what can I do to make it not dangerous?
I realize that this can depend on the shell, OS, utility used for making system calls (if being done inside a programming language), etc. However, I'd just like to know what kind of things I should watch out for.
Yes. That is dangerous.
JSON can include single quotes in string values (they do not need to be escaped). See "the tracks" at json.org.
Imagine the data is:
{"pwned": "you' & kill world;"}
Happy coding.
I would consider piping the data in to the program in question (e.g. use "popen" or even a version of "exec" that passes arguments directly) -- this can avoid issues that result from passing through the shell, for instance. Just as with SQL: using placeholders eliminates the need to trifle with "escaping".
If passing through a shell is the only way, then this may be an option (it is not tested, but something similar holds for a "<script>" context):
For every character in the JSON, which is either outside the range of "space" to "~" in ASCII, or has a special meaning in the '' context of a the shell such as \ and ' (but excluding " or any other character -- such as digits -- that can appear outside of "string" data, which is a limitation of this trivial approach), then encode the character using the \uXXXX JSON form. (Per the limitations defined above this should only encode potentially harmful characters appearing within the "strings" in the JSON and there should be no \\ pairs, no trailing \, and no 's, etc.)
It's ok. Just escape the character you use to wrap the string:
' should become '\''
So the JSON string
{"pwned": "you' & kill world;"}
becomes
{"pwned": "you'\'' & kill world;"}
and your final command, as the shell sees it, will be:
$ myscript '{"pwned": "you'\'' & kill world;"}'
We have an MS Access .mdb file produced, I think, by an Access 2000 database. I am trying to export a table to SQL with mdbtools, using this command:
mdb-export -S -X \\ -I orig.mdb Reviewer > Reviewer.sql
That produces the file I expect, except one thing: Some of the characters are represented as question marks. This: "He wasn't ready" shows up like this: "He wasn?t ready", only in some cases (primarily single/double curly quotes), where maybe the content was pasted into the DB from MS Word. Otherwise, the data look great.
I have tried various values for "export MDB_ICONV=". I've tried using iconv on the resulting file, with ISO-8859-1 in the from/to, with UTF-8 in the from/to, with WINDOWS-1250 and WINDOWS-1252 and WINDOWS-1256 in the from, in various combinations. But I haven't succeeded in getting those curly quotes back.
Frankly, based on the way the resulting file looks, I suspect the issue is either in the original .mdb file, or in mdbtools. The malformed characters are all single question marks, but it is clear that they are not malformed versions of the same thing; so (my gut says) there's not enough data in the resulting file; so (my gut says) the issue can't be fixed in the resulting file.
Has anyone run into this one before? Any tips for moving forward? FWIW, I don't have and never have had MS Access -- the file is coming from a 3rd party -- so this could be as simple as changing something on the database, and I would be very glad to hear that.
Thanks.
Looks like "smart quotes" have claimed yet another victim.
MS word takes plain ascii quotes and translates them to the double-byte left-quote and right-quote characters and translates a single quote into the double byte apostrophe character. The double byte characters in question blelong to to an MS code page which is roughly compatable with unicode-16 except for the silly quote characters.
There is a perl script called 'demoroniser.pl' which undoes all this malarky and converts the quotes back to plain ASCII.
It's most likely due to the fact that the data in the Access file is UTF, and MDB Tools is trying to convert it to ascii/latin/is0-8859-1 or some other encoding. Since these encodings don't map all the UTF characters properly, you end up with question marks. The information here may help you fix your encoding issues by getting MDB Tools to use the correct encoding.