John Davidson

Message:

I'm setting up a new server and want to support UTF-8 fully in my web application. I have tried this in the past on existing servers and always seem to end up having to fall back to ISO-8859-1.

Where exactly do I need to set the encoding/charsets? I'm aware that I need to configure Apache, MySQL, and PHP to do this — is there some standard checklist I can follow, or perhaps troubleshoot where the mismatches occur?

This is for a new Linux server, running MySQL 5, PHP, 5 and Apache 2.

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My Answer:
To ensure full UTF-8 support in your web application on a new Linux server running MySQL 5, PHP 5, and Apache 2, you can follow these steps:

1. Apache Configuration:
In your Apache configuration file (httpd.conf), make sure you have the following settings:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8


2. MySQL Configuration:
In your MySQL configuration file (my.cnf), make sure you have the following settings under the [mysqld] section:

character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci


3. PHP Configuration:
In your php.ini file, make sure you have the following settings:

default_charset = "UTF-8"
mbstring.language = Japanese
mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
mbstring.http_input = auto
mbstring.http_output = UTF-8
mbstring.encoding_translation = On
mbstring.detect_order = UTF-8


4. Database and Tables:
When creating your database and tables in MySQL, make sure to set the character set and collation to UTF-8. For example:

CREATE DATABASE mydatabase CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
CREATE TABLE mytable (
id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
);


5. HTML Meta Tag:
In your HTML files, make sure to include the following meta tag in the head section to specify the character set:




By following these steps and ensuring consistency in encoding/charsets settings across Apache, MySQL, PHP, and your web application, you should be able to fully support UTF-8 in your web application without having to fall back to ISO-8859-1. If you encounter any issues or mismatches, you can troubleshoot by checking the encoding settings in each component and ensuring they are all set to UTF-8.