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". ;-)

In reply to Re^5: Inserting UTF-8 on Mysql using DBI by afoken
in thread Inserting UTF-8 on Mysql using DBI by Fox

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