accents being replaced with garbage in text fields on forms

[canajien@gmail.com]

i have php form on an apache server that sends an email and stores in
a mysql database once it is submitted

when someone enters a name with an accent over a letter it mangles the
text

for example

the user enters Montréal and the email i get ends up looking like
Montréal, it also stores it in the database this way

any ideas on what is happening here and how i can correct it?

thanks

[Michael Fesser]

Re: accents being replaced with garbage in text fields on forms

..oO(canajien@g mail.com)

>i have php form on an apache server that sends an email and stores in
>a mysql database once it is submitted
>
>when someone enters a name with an accent over a letter it mangles the
>text
>
>for example
>
>the user enters Montréal and the email i get ends up looking like
>Montréal, it also stores it in the database this way
>
>any ideas on what is happening here and how i can correct it?

Something interprets UTF-8 encoded data as ISO-8859-1.
What encoding do you use on your pages and in your database?

Micha

[Captain Paralytic]

Re: accents being replaced with garbage in text fields on forms

On 24 Sep, 17:00, "canaj...@gmail .com" <canaj...@gmail .comwrote:

i have php form on an apache server that sends an email and stores in
a mysql database once it is submitted
>
when someone enters a name with an accent over a letter it mangles the
text
>
for example
>
the user enters Montréal and the email i get ends up looking like
Montréal, it also stores it in the database this way
>
any ideas on what is happening here and how i can correct it?
>
thanks

Try issuing SET NAMES UTF8 after connecting to the database, before
running any other queries.

[Gordon]

Re: accents being replaced with garbage in text fields on forms

On Sep 24, 5:00 pm, "canaj...@gmail .com" <canaj...@gmail .comwrote:

i have php form on an apache server that sends an email and stores in
a mysql database once it is submitted
>
when someone enters a name with an accent over a letter it mangles the
text
>
for example
>
the user enters Montréal and the email i get ends up looking like
Montréal, it also stores it in the database this way
>
any ideas on what is happening here and how i can correct it?
>
thanks

This sounds like a character encoding mismatch between the database
and the HTMl pages. The most usual cause is the web page being
encoded as iso-8859-1 (which I believe is the default format for
Dreamweaver), and the database being in UTF-8, but any character
encoding mismatch will produce similar results. Make sure that both
your database and web pages are using the same encoding, these days
this generally should be UTF-8.

UTF-8 is the preferred encoding because a valid ASCII string is also a
valid UTF-8 string, giving good backward compatibility. It also
supports the full set of Latin alphabet accents and characters in a
uniform way, and will even support far eastern languages (albeit in a
way that's quite inefficient).

[canajien@gmail.com]

Re: accents being replaced with garbage in text fields on forms

On Sep 25, 6:28 am, Gordon <gordon.mc...@n tlworld.comwrot e:

On Sep 24, 5:00 pm, "canaj...@gmail .com" <canaj...@gmail .comwrote:
>

i have php form on an apache server that sends an email and stores in
a mysql database once it is submitted

>

when someone enters a name with an accent over a letter it mangles the
text

>

for example

>

the user enters Montréal and the email i get ends up looking like
Montréal, it also stores it in the database this way

>

any ideas on what is happening here and how i can correct it?

>

thanks

>
This sounds like a character encoding mismatch between the database
and the HTMl pages.  The most usual cause is the web pagebeing
encoded as iso-8859-1 (which I believe is the default format for
Dreamweaver), and the databasebeingin UTF-8, but any character
encoding mismatch will produce similar results.  Make sure that both
your database and web pages are using the same encoding, these days
this generally should be UTF-8.
>
UTF-8 is the preferred encoding because a valid ASCII string is also a
valid UTF-8 string, giving good backward compatibility.  It also
supports the full set of Latin alphabetaccents and characters in a
uniform way, and will even support far eastern languages (albeit in a
way that's quite inefficient).

thanks for the lesson guys :)

the page was already set to utf-8 in a meta tag, so I added the
following to the form tag:

accept-charset="utf-8"

for good measure I made sure the mysql table would accept the
characters by resetting the table with:

ALTER TABLE tablename DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8

hopefully this will take care of my problem

[canajien@gmail.com]

Re: accents being replaced with garbage in text fields on forms

unfortunately the changes i made weren't enough to correct my problem,
however I did come across this page:

http://www.nicknettleton.com/zine/php/php-utf-8-cheatsheet

and once I made the changes to my php.ini everything started working

thanks again for the advise