Unicode Like Chinese Japanese Korean Characters In and Out MySQL Through PHP & Java

Both MySQL and PHP/Java support the Unicode, namely UTF-8. To be able to store into and retrieve these Unicode characters in MySQL database, one would need to do following things:

MySQL needs to be informed through PHP/Java. So, following code needs to be placed just after the connection. If the connection is centralized, this code is better to be in that centralized file:

PHP: mysql_query("SET NAMES 'UTF8'");
Java: stmt.execute("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

For all your PHP files generates HTML scripts, please include following code at top of the file:

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");

For all your HTML files, following script is needed in the head of HTML:

‹ meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" ›

Done. Please note, in first piece of PHP code, it is UTF8 and in second PHP code and last HTML script it is UTF-8. Else, it won’t work properly.

If your codes include any of following piece, simply remove it:

PHP: mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'UTF8'");
Java: stmt.execute("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'");