Insert an Arabic text MySQL

Question

I'm trying to store an Arabic text to the table, I searched a lot but I didn't find a solution that worked for me, so this is what I got:

$en = "OK";
$ar = "حسناً";
$link->query("INSERT INTO words (en,ar) VALUES ($en,$ar)");

The problem is when I insert it, the Arabic text looks like حسناً, my table's collation and MySQL's are utf8_general_ci, so is my database's, I also have mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'"); mysql_query('SET CHARACTER SET utf8');, but it doesn't work.

Answer 1

I recently had the same issues myself.

Here's a few pointers:

• ALL attributes must be set to ut8 (collation is NOT the same as charset)
• Save the document as UTF-8 (If you're using Notepad++, it's Format -> Convert to UFT-8)
• The header in both PHP and HTML should be set to UTF-8 (HTML: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> and PHP: header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
• Upon connecting to the databse, set the charset ti UTF-8 there as well, like this: $link->set_charset("utf8"); (directly after connecting)
• Also make sure your database and tables are set to UTF-8, you can do that like this:

ALTER DATABASE databasename CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci; ALTER TABLE tablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

Remember that EVERYTHING needs to be set to UFT-8 charcode, or else it'll insert stuff like "حسناً". Hope this helped!