On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 18:47 -0800, Rob Gould wrote:
> I've got a PHP application that pulls in data from a mySQL database.  The 
> data is a series of wine producers, and many of them have special foreign 
> characters over the a's and o's.  
> 
> When I go and view the data from my database using myPHPAdmin, the characters 
> look fine, but when I pull the data into my web-page the special characters 
> get messed up.
> 
> For whatever reason, when I first set up the database, someone told me to 
> preserve special characters by setting my collation for the wine-producer 
> field to "latin1_swedish_ci".  The data seems to be in there ok, so at least 
> that works.
> 
> Should I have used utf-8 instead?  Can I set something in the doctype or 
> header of my web-page to make it so that my website displays 
> latin1_swedish_ci-based characters properly, or should I change my database 
> field-type to be something different?  My main fear is messing up the 
> database (I'll back up first if I have to chance the field collation)

SOunds like your website is UTF8 and your DB as you say is latin1. You
have a few choices. You can set the php.ini config value:

    default_charset = "iso-8859-1"

You can also set the meta tag (probably best to set the PHP config and
the meta tag):

    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1" />

Or, and this is what I would do, convetr your database to UTF-8. That
way you're prepared for the rest of the world. In this day and age I
would creat a site with anything but UTF-8.

Here's some reading for you:

    http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Cheers,
Rob.
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