Posted by Ian Hobson on 10/19/07 11:32

Hi guys,

I have a problem that I believe is related to character sets.

I'm in the UK and I need to store £ (GBP currency symbol) in a MySQL
database, using php, pull it out again and put it into a .pdf file.

On my test machine everythign work fine - the text can be input in a
text or textarea field, gets processed via mysql_real_escape_string on
its way to the MySQl database, get stored as the single character
according to phpMyAdmin. When the data is sent back to the screen both
display and edit field contents appear correct. The code also create a
dynamic dpf file, which contains the correct symbol and prints correctly.

On the production machine things are slightly different. The character
is altered as it is stored - an "A with a hat" character is stored
before the pound symbol. Although this displays correctly on show and
edit in the browser, the pdf has the "A with hat" symbol prepended, and
this is also printed.

Although there are small differences in versions between php, and apache
between the two machines, there are no differences I can see in the
character sets of database setup, my.ini/cnf , php.ini or httpd.conf files.

They both have the database in Latin1 and connection as utf-8.

The production machine is Ubuntu Server LTS "out of the box" (running as
a VM). The test machine is Win2K with Apache2, PHP5 and MySQl
5.0.24a-community-nt - all fairly "out of the box".

Anyone have an idea how I can trace the problem, or how to fix it?

Thanks for your input.

Ian

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