1. Set your code editor to save all files as UTF-8.
2. Set the character set of each column, table and database to UTF8. Notice that the MySQL name for UTF-8 has no hyphen.
3. Set all PHP-MySQL connections to UTF8 using
mysqli_set_charset('utf8'). This is preferable to SET NAMES, which does not control charset inside PHP functions, e.g. mysqli_escape_string().4. Set the charset in the web page header (notice: no quotes round the charset name):
<?php header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); ?>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
5. If your webapp needs to set its character set dynamically, say from a process that puts the desired charset in $_SESSION['charset'], you'll need functionality like this ...
<?php
$charset = ( isset( $_SESSION['charset'] )) ? $_SESSION['charset'] : "utf8";
$htmlcharset = htmlcharset( $charset);
header( "Content-type: text/html; charset=$htmlcharset" );
echo "<head><meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html;charset=$htmlcharset'></head>";
...
function htmlcharset( $mysqlcharset ) {
$a = acharsets();
$n = array_search( $mysqlcharset, acolumn( $a, 0 ));
return ( $n === FALSE ? "" : $a[$n][1] );
}
function acharsets() {
return array (
// MySQL NAME HTML NAME DESCRIPTION
array('armscii8' , 'ARMSCII-8' , 'Armenian',1),
array('ascii' , 'US-ASCII' , 'US ASCII',1),
array('big5' , 'BIG5' , 'Traditional Chinese',2),
array('cp1250' , 'CP1250' , 'Windows Central European',1),
array('cp1251' , 'CP12511' , 'Windows Cyrillic',1),
array('cp1256' , 'CP1256' , 'Windows Arabic',1),
array('cp1257' , 'CP1257' , 'Windows Baltic',1),
array('cp852' , 'CP852' , 'DOS Central European',1),
array('cp866' , 'CP866' , 'DOS Russian',1),
array('cp932' , 'CP932' , 'SJIS for Windows Japanese',2),
array('eucjpms' , 'EUC-JP' , 'UJIS for Windows Japanese',2),
array('euckr' , 'EUC-KR' , 'Korean',2),
array('gb2312' , 'GB2312' , 'Simplified Chinese',2),
array('gbk' , 'GBK' , 'Simplified Chinese',2),
array('geostd8' , 'GEOSTD8' , 'Georgian',1),
array('greek' , 'ISO 8859-7' , 'Greek',1),
array('hebrew' , 'ISO 8859-8' , 'Hebrew',1),
array('koi8u' , 'KOI8-U' , 'Ukrainian',1),
array('latin1' , 'CP1252' , 'West European',1),
array('latin2' , 'ISO 8859-2' , 'Central European',1),
array('latin5' , 'ISO 8859-9' , 'Turkish',1),
array('latin7' , 'ISO 8859-13' , 'Baltic',1),
array('macce' , 'MACCENTRALEUROPE', 'Mac Central European',1),
array('macroman' , 'MACROMAN' , 'Mac West European',1),
array('sjis' , 'SHIFT-JIS' , 'Japanese',2),
array('tis620' , 'TIS620' , 'Thai',1),
array('ujis' , 'EUC-JP' , 'Japanese',3),
array('utf8' , 'UTF-8' , 'Unicode',3)
);
}
?>
Notice that
UCS-2 is missing from this list: mysql clients don't support it.Last updated 5 Mar 2025
