Unknown character display

**jaysmoke** · May 12, 2009, 15:43

Hi,
This is very frustrating but I have a problem. When I submit a form, the browser displays a question mark instead of the character and this is making my text display look very ugly.

Please is there anything I can do to fix this problem. The problem can be found here: http://www.thascript.com/?lid=67

**Dan Grossman** · May 12, 2009, 15:50

Your database connection or database table or both are not set to use the UTF-8 encoding you're serving the page in. The character sets you're using to store the data and to display the data must match.

**jaysmoke** · May 12, 2009, 16:01

Am so lost. Am a newbie so can you explain in plain english what I need to do to get rid of all that mess? Thanks

**JREAM** · May 13, 2009, 00:32

Hey I had this a lot as well,

in your html document it should have this meta tag to fix it (between the <head> here </head> tags)
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

**Dan Grossman** · May 13, 2009, 00:34

Originally Posted by JREAM

Hey I had this a lot as well,

in your html document it should have this meta tag to fix it (between the <head> here </head> tags)
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

He already has that meta tag, but the content in his database is not encoded as UTF-8. It looks like ISO-8859-1 but there are still a few odd characters when viewed as that encoding as well.

**spence_noodle** · May 13, 2009, 12:18

He needs to tell mysql query which text encoding he will be using and to do this just place this before any insert and update:

Code MySQL:

// Set Names to utf8
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

Where 'utf8' is, this can be changed to whatever you want, e.g. 'ISO-8859-1'.

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