é being converted from database to site

Question

I have a MySQL database that is storing business data... In the database, when running a select against a business name that contains an accented e (é), it comes up correctly (showing me that it is stored correctly.) On our website, though, it is showing up as the diamond with the question mark.

I checked out database and found the following:

Character_sets_dir          /usr/share/mysql/charsets/
Character_set_client        utf8
Character_set_connection    utf8
Character_set_database      latin1
Character_set_filesystem    binary
Character_set_results       utf8
Character_set_server        latin1
Character_set_system        utf8

Where things get lost is on the website itself... The web page is encoded as UTF8...

Any ideas of where the conversion may be failing?

-Wes

Answer 1

You need to ask the database from another angle. Please run this:

SHOW CREATE DATABASE mydb;

This will tell you what it sees. If you want to change the Character set and.or collation, do this:

ALTER DATABASE mydb ... ;

In mysql, ALTER DATABASE can change character set and/or collation. I have mentioned this in my past posts in the DBA StackExchange :

• Dec 04, 2012 : Why default character_set_server is latin1?
• Sep 18, 2012 : change encoding of database from latin1_swedish_ci to utf8
• Sep 26, 2011 : How do I configure MySQL '5.1.49-1ubuntu8' to show multibyte characters?
• Sep 19, 2011 : How to convert mysql database charset to utf-8