Re^4: Inserting UTF-8 on Mysql using DBI

I found the problem, as it turns out, neither mysql client nor php were using utf8 after all, only perl.. ugh... one thing I still don't understand though is why the characters where being display right on the browser despite the fact the page always had the content-type utf8 header... I guess I understand charset encoding even less now..

Comment on Re^4: Inserting UTF-8 on Mysql using DBI

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Re^5: Inserting UTF-8 on Mysql using DBI by Corion (Patriarch) on Oct 16, 2010 at 17:10 UTC
Browsers really like to make a "best effort" at guessing the content, even if they have to deviate from the `Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8` header. Which is why eliminating all intermediaries and cross-checking all steps is the only approach I know that works.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^5: Inserting UTF-8 on Mysql using DBI by afoken (Chancellor) on Oct 18, 2010 at 14:43 UTC
Smells like "the other" programs inserted UTF-8 byte streams that luckily came back unmodified from MySQL. So you could insert and fetch something that looked like UTF-8, even when MySQL converted the byte stream from what it thought to be ISO-8859-1 to broken UTF-8 while inserting, and back from broken UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1. A big hint for such things going wrong is that the strings have the wrong length in the database (one or two extra characters for each non-ASCII character). Have a look at the Unicode tests in DBD::ODBC, especially `t/40UnicodeRoundTrip.t` and `t/41Unicode.t`. The browser shows the correct characters because you told it explicitly to do so: There is a UTF-8 byte stream in the HTML resource delivered by the server, and the HTML resource (or its headers) says that it is encoded as UTF-8. It simply does not matter that the software generating the page accidentally or intentionally wrote that byte stream as what it thought to be ISO-8859-1 characters. Alexander -- Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)	[reply] [d/l] [select]