While saving the information to the database field the settings were as follows:  character set: latin1 collation: latin1_swedish_ci   Once the users updated the information,i noticed that many information were saved as "?????????????? ??????????????? ???? ?????" (Question marks) to the database.  English(language) information were saved without questions marks. All other languages were saved with question marks.  Now i have changed the character set to utf8 and all the languages are saved properly.  The problem is that i need to recover the information which is saved as question marks.  eg:"?????????????? ??????????????? ???? ?????"  XAMPP Version: 5.6.19 Navicat version 11.0.17   Database server Server version: 10.1.10-MariaDB - mariadb.org binary distribution  Web server Apache/2.4.17 (Win32) OpenSSL/1.0.2d PHP/5.6.19 PHP version: 5.6.19  phpMyAdmin Version information: 4.5.1  Please help me to get the original data.
326
I'm setting up a new server and want to support UTF-8 fully in my web application. I have tried this in the past on existing servers and always seem to end up having to fall back to ISO-8859-1.  Where exactly do I need to set the encoding/charsets? I'm aware that I need to configure Apache, MySQL, and PHP to do this — is there some standard checklist I can follow, or perhaps troubleshoot where the mismatches occur?  This is for a new Linux server, running MySQL 5, PHP, 5 and Apache 2.
99906
One of the responses to  suggested that I should make sure my database can handle UTF-8 characters correctly. How I can do this with MySQL?
112694
What mysql functions are there (if any) to trim leading zeros from an alphanumeric text field?    Field with value "00345ABC" would need to return "345ABC".
14520
For example, mysql quote table name using   SELECT * FROM `table_name`;   notice the `   Does other database ever use different char to quote their table name
1735
In order to store results in the newly released (Winter 16') Platform Cache, I need an alphanumeric string, but currently have a String with the report name that I'm attempting to store, some of which have spaces, hyphens, parenthesis, etc. (i.e. "Sales - Actual Results (TY)").  I'm not sure in APEX how I would strip all these unwanted characters from the string to convert it into the alphanumeric key that I need.  Please &amp; Thank you!
3050
I have a WordPress install on a dedicated server with decent memory (upwards of 8GB).  The WordPress install includes many plugins - 50 active plugins. Most important to note is the  plugin to make WordPress multilingual. The theme is .  The stack is LAMP - CentOS 6.3, Apache 2.4.4, Percona MySQL, PHP-FPM.  I have been quite stupid, and didn't set up a test or staging server.  Everything was running fine till I updated to WordPress 3.8, and also updated several plugins at the same time.  I didn't pay attention at the time, but all my widgets got messed up, and so did any sort of navigation etc.  I enabled error_log for a bit, i.e.  ini_set('log_errors',TRUE); ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL); ini_set('error_log', dirname(__FILE__) . '/error_log.txt');   This resulted in an immense file - basically the error_log grows by about a GB every 4 minutes or so.  The primary error I found in the error log was database server disconnect, better known as      MySQL server has gone away   The first priority was to patch the problem. So I installed  plugin. This mostly, though not completely solved the issue. Many of the widgets came back.  However, the special (non-English) characters are all messed up (converted to question marks). I tried to fix this by opening wp-mysql-ping.php and commenting out   if ( !DB_CHARSET &amp;&amp; version_compare(mysql_get_server_info($this-&gt;dbh), '4.1.0', '&gt;='))                                     {                                         $this-&gt;query("SET NAMES '" . DB_CHARSET . "'");                                     }   Didn't help.  Besides, the plugin is not a permanent or complete solution. So leaving the site in this messed up state, I started working on other possibilities:  As suggested at , I edited my.cnf to add  wait_timeout = 60   Didn't help.  Also added caching to my.cnf  query_cache_type = 1 query_cache_limit = 8M query_cache_size = 512M   Didn't help.  (and yes, I restarted mysql every time I edited my.cnf)  Also tried the method : In wp-db.php before  $this-&gt;select( $this-&gt;dbname, $this-&gt;dbh );   I added  $this-&gt;query("set session wait_timeout=600" );   Didn't help.  I'm at my wit's end. Please help!
85743
I am working on a project that uses a CSV file supplied by the client to populate a database. The client is to create the spreadsheet, then save it as a CSV to be uploaded, which is then parsed into a database.  The problem is, whenever the client saves the excel spreadsheet as an MS-DOS .csv file, many of the special characters get converted to question marks "?" (symbols such as ' " / ). However, if we then open the CSV file and manually replace each ? with the right character it works fine.  The problem is that the data file is HUGE, and we can't reasonably do this, so I was hoping there was a way to save it. We have tried exporting as Unicode and ASCII to no avail. We have also tried uploading to google docs, and re-saving, however, it also breaks those characters.
107453
When executing certain files (mainly batch) using PsExec I get these weird ́╗┐' symbols before my command. My initial thought was, that I were using wrong encoding, but after checking, I realized that all my files were using UTF-8.
73925
Earlier today a question was asked regarding .  The top answer, at time of writing, suggests in PHP just using htmlspecialchars and mysql_real_escape_string.   My question is: Is this always enough? Is there more we should know? Where do these functions break down?
49624
How can I change the default codepage/charset on a linux system from latin1 to utf8? I need to do this on two systems, one is running Ubuntu and the other Debian.
44733
The maximum text string for a field in a geodatabase is 320 characters.    The data I am importing has long character strings and it seems to be truncating when I convert into shapefile at the max text string and messing the fields up.  Is there a way to extend this to 700-1000 characters?
69352
Hi I was translating one of my plugins in "CodeStyling Localization". when I update my plugin my translation erased. Is there anyway to find it ? And How can I backup my translation (I don't want to waste my time next time :))
115935
I have a form with a textarea. Users enter a block of text which is stored in a database.  Occasionally a user will paste text from Word containing smart quotes or emdashes. Those characters appear in the database as: â€“, â€™, â€œ ,â€  What function should I call on the input string to convert smart quotes to regular quotes and emdashes to regular dashes?   I am working in PHP.  Update: Thanks for all of the great responses so far. The page on Joel's site about encodings is very informative:   Some notes on my environment:  The MySQL database is using UTF-8 encoding. Likewise, the HTML pages that display the content are using UTF-8 (Update:) by explicitly setting the meta content-type.  On those pages the smart quotes and emdashes appear as a diamond with question mark.  Solution:  Thanks again for the responses. The solution was twofold:   Make sure the database and HTML files were explicitly set to use UTF-8 encoding. Use htmlspecialchars() instead of htmlentities().
80408
What are the differences between UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32?  I understand that they will all store Unicode, and that each uses a different number of bytes to represent a character. Is there an advantage to choosing one over the other?
105113
In PostgreSQL, what is the difference between collations C and C.UTF-8?   Both show up in rows of pg_collation. Is it perhaps the case that C.UTF-8 is the same as C with encoding UTF-8 regardless or what the actual encoding of a database is?
121199
When I run a particular SQL script in Unix environments, I'm am seeing a '^M' character at the end of each line of the SQL script as it is echoed to the command-line.  I don't know on which OS the SQL script was originally created.  What is causing this and how do I fix it?
10511
I have two issues with a csv file that occur when I try and edit it in Excel.   I have an ISBN column that gets reformatted to scientific format every time I save the file The encoding for the file is changed from UTF-8 to ANSI when I open the file.   It is really, really frustrating and a complete waste of time.  Is there any way that I can force Excel to leave the format of the file alone?