PDO and UTF-8 special characters in PHP / MySQL?

Question

I am using MySQL and PHP 5.3 and tried this code.

$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'root';
$dbpass = '';
$con = mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "");
mysql_set_charset('utf8');
if (!$con)
{
  die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
}

mysql_select_db("kdict", $con);
$sql = "SELECT * FROM `en-kh` where english='a'";
echo $sql;
$result = mysql_query($sql);

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
  echo $row['english'] . " </br> " . $row['khmer'];
  echo "<br />";
}
?>

=> I got good UTF-8 render display, well done.

But for now I create a class PDO to keep easy to extend and more easy

 class crud {
     // code..
     public function conn()
     {
         isset($this->username);
         isset($this->password);
         if (!$this->db instanceof PDO)
         {
             $this->db = new PDO($this->dsn, $this->username, $this->password);
             $this->db->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
             $this->db->setAttribute(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND, "SET NAMES 'utf8'");   
          }
      }
      /*more code here*/
}



/*** a new crud object ***/
$crud = new crud();
/*** The DSN ***/
$crud->dsn = "mysql:dbname=kdict;host=localhost";

/*** MySQL username and password ***/
$crud->username = 'root';
$crud->password = '';
/*** select all records from table ***/
$records = $crud->rawSelect("SELECT * FROM `en-kh` where english='a'");

/*** fetch only associative array of values ***/
$rows = $records->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

/*** display the records ***/
foreach($rows as $row)
{
    foreach($row as $fieldname=>$value)
    {
        echo $fieldname.' = '.$value.'<br />';
    }
    echo '<hr />';
}
?>

But it displays my character something like this '????'

I found this link on Stack Overflow, it looks like the same problem i met Special characters in PHP / MySQL

It looks the same as my problem => I tried to fix it, but I still doesn't work.

$this->setAttribute(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND, "SET NAME'utf8'");

Can anyone tell me what the problem is? How can I correct it?

thanks

Answer 1

You're missing an S: it's SET NAMES and not SET NAME:

$this->setAttribute(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND, "SET NAMES 'utf8'");

You also need to un-comment it of course. Also, PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND can not be set with PDO::setAttribute() after you've established your database connection (the constant name says it all), you've to specify it in the constructor using the $driver_options argument, like this:

$this->db = new PDO($this->dsn, $this->username, $this->password, array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES 'utf8'"));

An alternative to this is to just execute that very same query immediately after connecting:

$this->db = new PDO($this->dsn, $this->username, $this->password);
$this->db->exec("SET NAMES 'utf8';");