Posted by slavi.marinov on 10/24/05 15:39

Hello all,

I have a simple question on PHP and the way it handles strings.

Let's say I have a database and a php script that communicates with the
database. The database has some kind of character encoding - let's say
UTF-8, UTF-16, or something different.

When I select some string from the database, for example:

$res = mysql_query("SELECT movie_name FROM my_table");
$row = mysql_fetch_row($res);
echo $row[0];

the database will return the movie_name field in a correctly-encoded
way.

My question is, how do you tell the PHP interpreter what encoding to
use when displaying the text that the mysql queries return? In other
words, will the $row[0] be displayed correctly regardless the database
encoding, provided the database encoding and the HTML <meta> tags are
the same, or do I have to set the PHP encoding in some config file?
What character representation does PHP use when working with strings?

Best Regards,
Slavi

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