greek characters sql server doesnt show in php

Question

My server database has a table with collation: greek_ci_ai and The problem is that greek characters are showing up as question marks(????) i tried header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-7") and <meta charset="utf-8" /> but the problem still remains and I can't figure out how to solve it

What happens if you use `utf8_encode($string)` on the result string? — Matthias Bö, May 31 '18 at 17:31
Also, are you sure that the values are being stored as an `nvarchar` not a `varchar`. What is the query that is returning the values? — Thom A, May 31 '18 at 17:37
First of all, what charset is the string *actually* stored as, and what do you expect it to look like? Second, post a `bin2hex($problem_string_here);` so we can inspect the data. Third, you should probably read this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/279170/utf-8-all-the-way-through — Sammitch, May 31 '18 at 18:14
i have an input type='text' in html to insert some values in database with php post and the query is a simple Select * from table1 with sqlsrv $sql = "SELECT * FROM JobLocations"; $stmt = sqlsrv_query($connection,$sql); thank you in advance because im not familiar with encoding — Legend Whirlwind, Jun 01 '18 at 09:42
also the values in database are nvarchar and i tried the echo mb_detect_encoding($sql); and the result was ASCII — Legend Whirlwind, Jun 01 '18 at 11:01
the problem it was in connection string because i missed to put "CharacterSet" =>'UTF-8' everything is fine — Legend Whirlwind, Jun 01 '18 at 12:32

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 05 '20 at 18:40

You can try editing your connectionInfo to include "CharacterSet"=>"UTF-8" as below:

$serverName = "localhost";
$connectionInfo = array("Database"=>"DBName", 
                        "UID"=>"UserName", 
                        "PWD"=>"Password", 
                        "CharacterSet"=>"UTF-8");

$con = sqlsrv_connect($serverName, $connectionInfo);

if ($con === false) {
    echo "Connection could not be established.<br />";
    die(print_r(sqlsrv_errors(), true));
}

greek characters sql server doesnt show in php

1 Answers1