Encoding problem

I'm creating an international website on which the users should be able to write in any language. My database is set to UTF-8 but when I enter some non-latin characters into a column through HeidiSQL they change into question marks (?). When I enter the same characters through the website encoded in UTF-8 they are stored and displayed correctly on the website so I'm guessing it's just the HeidiSQL application that can't display or edit them.

Even if I have entered the characters through the website, this is what I see when trying to look at them in HeidiSQL:

??????????

I searched the forums and found that you should run the query SET NAMES utf8 after connecting but it just changed from question marks to this:

საქა

I'd say HeidiSQL lacks full support for UTF-8. Even if you change settings to use a font like Arial Unicode you'll get question marks. Even more, data inserted from HeidiSQL seems to be corrupted.

Full Unicode support is a good wish for version 4 ;-)

Yes, definitely. And we definitely need some Delphi assistance for making the rest UTF-8 compatible. What we made yet is:
- Switch to the unicode enabled version of SynEdit (The query editor)
- Drop SMDBGrid and use a unicode enabled DBGrid (TNT)
- Use the unicode capable VirtualTreeView as replacements for all TListViews
- Add pulldowns for selecting charset at table and database creation/altering.

The remaining part is the Zeos Lib which is not unicode capable as far as I know. Any hints on that?

When were Heidi 4 released?

I'm new here. First, anse, thanx for a great product -- gut gemacht!

I had a problem with loading data containing east-European characters; I solved it by putting SET NAMES latin2; in my SQL file before the INSERTs.

But while searching for a solution I found this thread, and once I got the info it was easy enough to post it here.

It appears Zeos can work with Unicode (utf8?) and MySql; see
http://zeos.firmos.at/viewtopic.php?t=1862&highlight=unicode+support&sid=c1a34c5bc1974c6f631caf8862bc2a22

Perhaps this howto can help regarding that:
http://www.allanime.org/index.php?id=257

Hope this helps; unicode support would be cool.

Hello BadMax,

The information in this forum topic is outdated. The HeidiSQL team has already put significant effort into making Zeos UTF-8 compatible, as you can experience in a nightly build. See the change log (svn revision history for path "/components/zeosdbo") for details.

The remaining issues are sql query / string handling in HeidiSQL, which needs to be converted from string to WideString and char to WideChar.

Some things will work and use UTF-8 in the current nightly build, other things are broken.

As for HeidiSQL 4, no, it has not been released, and no date has been set.