Greek characters in mysql do not show *RESOLVED*

[sonaht]

I 've completed the installation of support suite and all is well, as far as i can see.

But trying to see my data directly from mysql gives me mangled characters...even though the suite displays everything correctly

MySQL info from admin CP has as follows

...

character_set_client latin1   
character_set_connection latin1   
character_set_database latin1   
character_set_filesystem binary   
character_set_results latin1   
character_set_server latin1   
character_set_system utf8

.....

what i am doing wrong ?

have a look at my last post - RESOLVED

[craigbrass]

That is normal. Kayako's products have code in them to display all character sets correctly where as phpMyAdmin (which I assume you are using to view database tables) does not.

[sonaht]

so what you are saying is that when i decide to export data from mysql i will not be able to see what i have just exported ?

[craigbrass]

As long as you open that in a program that supports greek characters, you should be able to view it.

[sonaht]

even ems mysql manager does not show the greek chars..

do i have to change the collation upon creation of my db maybe ?

[craigbrass]

Maybe. You can change it after creation too. It is on the options tab if I remember right.

[sonaht]

for the last 2 hours i ve tryied every collation possible

i think i am missing something

it has something to do with the server collation as well i think

[sonaht]

does anyone use utf8 and utf8_general_ci ?

if yes how did you configure mysql to this values ?

[sonaht]

after a few recompiles i ve got it working by altering the my.cnf on a demo pc

will see if everything works on a normal server and will post again

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi sonaht,

What MySQL charset did you end up using?

[sonaht]

the following is part of my.cnf file

[client]
port            = 3306
socket          = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
default-character-set=utf8


[mysqld]
#
# * Basic Settings
#
user            = mysql
pid-file        = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid
socket          = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
port            = 3306
basedir         = /usr
datadir         = /var/lib/mysql
tmpdir          = /tmp
language        = /usr/share/mysql/english

collation_server=utf8_unicode_ci
character_set_server=utf8
skip-character-set-client-handshake

skip-external-locking

red and bold indicate my additions

It worked for me.. the support suite works as before, additionally now i can use ems mysql manager and see my data the same way i typed them in.

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi sonaht,

Many thanks for sharing this and thank you for pointing me to the post. I have edited the thread title and made it sticky.

[areh]

The reason why the data shows wrongly in phpMyAdmin etc. when you store data as UTF-8, is that the MySQL client is Latin1 by default (it doesn't matter that you DB or DB server engine is utf-8 then). This destroys your data (to a certain degree) and makes it impossible to use any any other tool to look at the data. While it is true that the data will show correct in Kayako in most cases, it is very unplesant to correct this later and if you need integration with true UTF-8 applications, you would have problems.

So I reccomend to send "set name utf8" with every query in the program. It is some overhead, but it is the only way to ensure good database content and data will be readable everywhere. I have not tested the solution given here, but earlier test has shown bad results.

For US people, this doesn't matter. But for everyone else that has non-english charsets, the results can be ugly.

[wintech2003]

@sonaht Did those changes to your my.cnf work even after you had the database created or is it necessary to make this change before creating the supportsuite database?

[sonaht]

first i made these changes and afterwards made a clean install !!!

did not tryied the other way around !!!