PHP Select problem with polish characters

Question

I have a problem with searching when I type in Polish characters. When I enter the normal value, the search engine normally works. However, when I enter a value with Polish characters, for example ł, I can not find anything.

One more thing, when I replace $searchingVal with ordinary text with a Polish character in this select then the search engine works correctly.

$searchingVal = $ _GET ['name'];
"Select * From` customers` WHERE name LIKE '% $ searchingVal%' "

Why do you have a space in the variable name ? `$ searchingVal` — executable, Apr 04 '19 at 13:12
This is almost certainly some type of _encoding_ problem, either in PHP or on MySQL. So, you should research encoding. — Tim Biegeleisen, Apr 04 '19 at 13:12
But when i put ordinary text with a Polish character in this select then the search engine works correctly. — Patryk Przybylski, Apr 04 '19 at 13:14
PHP and mysql (or whatever DB you are using) can work with UTF-8 and then support polish characters and also search for it. But as stated above, you most likely do not work with utf8 chars, second you have two spaces too much and third, you are vulnerable to SQL injection. — eX0du5, Apr 04 '19 at 13:25
the positioning of spaces in your code is wrong in a number of places. The code won't work at all as it stands. — Spudley, Apr 04 '19 at 13:27
Are you sure you want to use that query exactly like that? Please do some research about SQL injection first - or I'll search for your site and use `$searchingVal = "'; DROP TABLE customers; SELECT '";` as an input ;) — Nico Haase, Apr 04 '19 at 13:30
You need to fix your broken charset. Have a look through https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31897407/mysql-and-php-utf-8-with-cyrillic-characters/31899827#31899827 — Qirel, Apr 04 '19 at 13:42

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 04 '19 at 13:38

This sounds very much like an issue with character encoding. Most likely, your MySQL's charset is set to Latin1 or similar. Switching everything to UTF8 would eliminate these problems. You can try doing this conversion manually, at the cost of performance of course, so you could compare

CONVERT(name USING utf8)

with

'%' . utf8_encode($searchingVal) . '%';

Other than that, your code is wide open to SQL injection, so instead of a SQL similar to your question, you should really use prepared statement, therefore the code might be more like:

$sql = "SELECT *
        FROM `customers`
        WHERE CONVERT(name USING utf8) LIKE ?"

$db = new mysqli($dbHost, $dbUser, $dbPassword, $dbName);
$stmt = $db->prepare($sql);
$stmt->bind_param('s', '%' . utf8_encode($searchingVal) . '%';
$stmt->execute();

PHP Select problem with polish characters

1 Answers1