Why Are My Japanese Characters Garbled in phpMyAdmin Despite UTF-8 Encoding?

Encoding Issues in phpMyAdmin: Displaying UTF-8 Characters

While interacting with a database containing Japanese characters, users may encounter garbled text in phpMyAdmin despite the database being correctly set to UTF-8. This issue arises from data inconsistencies between the database and the display in phpMyAdmin.

Typically, the cause lies in storing incorrect UTF-8 strings in the database. To display characters accurately in phpMyAdmin, the data must be correctly encoded from the outset. However, converting the database to UTF-8 can potentially disrupt applications that rely on MySQL's earlier charset-handling methods.

Before attempting any conversion, it's essential to determine if the MySQL version is above 4.1, which introduced charset awareness. If it is, the problem most likely stems from using latin1 character collation, which may have led to storing UTF-8 text as bytes in the database.

To resolve this:

1. Open a backup of your database in a UTF-8 capable text editor and verify the character encoding.
2. Replace any latin1_general_ci or latin1 collation settings with utf8.
3. Save this as a new file to avoid overwriting the backup.
4. Import the new file into the database.
5. In php applications using mysql-mod-mysql, add mysql_query("SET NAMES UTF8"); after mysql_connect() to display characters correctly.

Additionally, ensuring proper character encoding in my.ini for mysql-cli is crucial:

# CLIENT SECTION
[mysql]
default-character-set=utf8
# SERVER SECTION
[mysqld]
default-character-set=utf8

For MySQL charset documentation, refer to: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-server.html

phpMyAdmin utilizes php-mod-mysqli for database connections. To avoid potential issues, it's highly recommended to migrate to modern frameworks like CodeIgniter or Zend, which employ mysqli or pdo for database communication.

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