Viewing characters in UTF

niente0's profile image niente0 posted 12 years ago in Feature discussion Permalink
Hello all, I created a database with UTF-8 charset. After some trouble, I can write and read any special characters from the UTF-8 DB (I'm using ASP pages). However, if I look directly into the database with Heidi, I cannot see any special character I wrote but only some garbage.
For example, if I write a 'é' into a text field, it's translated into 'é' (I think it's the 'é' character shown in ISO-8892-1 encoding). When I read it from ASP, it reads correctly again as 'é'.
Would it be possible to display the content of databases with the UTF-8 encoding in a correct way also in Heidi?
Ie. 'sélectionner' instead of 'sélectionner'? happy
Thank you
ansgar's profile image ansgar posted 12 years ago Permalink
Your database content is broken if you see such characters in HeidiSQL. Check another client, like phpMyAdmin or MySQL Query Browser or Navicat or whatever - all of them will display the same broken characters.

But you can fix that. You will need to transform text columns to utf8 charset. I guess your database, table and columns are set up to use the mentioned ISO encoding?
niente0's profile image niente0 posted 12 years ago Permalink
Thanks for your answer. Yes, the DB was built as ISO-8892-1 latin encoding, and then converted into UTF-8. I'll fix all the texts with a series of 'replace'.
Anyway, I solved my 'garbage chars' problem. At some point, during the xmlhttprequest, single-byte special UTF chars were interpreted as 2-byte latin chars and written into database.
The solution I found was to add or move to the top of my ASP files these two instructions:
Response.CodePage = 65001
Response.CharSet = "utf-8"

Now it works perfectly and I can read any character even inside Heidi!
Thank you again for your answer happy

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