Hello All -

I'm interested in creating a utf-8 database that would handle english-language tables, japanese language-tables and german-language tables.

I've gotten pretty good a php, but I know very little about mysql databases - the projects that I've built so far have just been english language ones so I haven’t really need to go further than that until now.

I'm also using a mysql front-end called sqlyog v5.19 which has worked pretty well for me on past projects.

So, as a test I created a new DB with a table called “japanese”. I cut and pasted some japanese text into my "japanese" table to see what would happen... and I got a bunch of question marks. Then I went searching on the web for why this would be and apparently this is because the default character set for my db is set to DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1.

I went into my.ini and changed default-character-set=latin1 to default-character-set=utf8. I also did the same under the "Client" section of my.ini.

I saved the ini, closed it, restarted the server, and then using sqlyog, created a new sample db with one table. When I looked at the specs for the db, it shows a collation of latin1_swedish_ci (not utf8); when I look at the table specs, it shows: ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 (again, not utf8).

I’m hoping that the good folks here could guide me through exactly what mysql setting I need to apply to ensure that all future dbs I create can handle multiple langugages if needed.

According to my phpinfo() I’m running apache server v2.2.3 and mysql v5.0.27.

Great appreciation in advance for all guidance!

Expatriate

UTF-8 is an encoding scheme, not a collation. I'd suggest you start with Adding a Collation, then pursue the page citations ir provides as needed. That will help you to understand what collations are, and what choices you need to make before you can tackle the underlying problems you need to resolve.

-PatP