Why are my Persian characters displaying incorrectly in my new script after migrating from an older database engine?

Incompatibility in Character Encoding of Stored Data: Understanding and Resolution

In this scenario, you've encountered a situation where data stored in a database appears differently between an old and a new script. The crux of the issue lies in character encoding, which has caused inconsistencies in the display of Persian characters.

Database Configuration

Your database is configured with UTF-8 character set and UTF-8 Persian collation, which is appropriate for handling Persian characters. Similarly, your Codeigniter script also has the correct settings for character set and collation. However, it seems that the older script was using a different database engine (TUBADBENGINE or TUBA DB ENGINE), which is less known and likely has its own way of handling character encoding.

Data Storage Discrepancy

When you insert Persian characters into the database using the old script, they are stored in the database in a non-standard format. This is indicated by the strange character sequence (e.g., عمران) that you encounter. However, the old script can properly interpret and display these characters.

Retrieval and Display Inconsistencies

When you fetch the same data using the new script, the characters are not displayed correctly. This is because the new script assumes the data is stored in UTF-8 format, which is incompatible with the non-standard encoding that the old script used. As a result, you see garbled characters like عمراÙ.

Possible Explanations

One possible explanation is that the old script used a database connection that was set to a different character set, such as Latin1. This would cause the Persian characters to be encoded incorrectly upon insertion into the database.

Another possibility is that the old script had a bug or a custom data handling mechanism that altered the character encoding during retrieval. This could explain why the characters appear differently in the new script.

Resolving the Disparity

To resolve this issue, you need to convert the data in the database to the correct character encoding. You can use a query like the following:

SELECT CONVERT(BINARY CONVERT(field_name USING latin1) USING utf8) FROM table_name

If this works, you can convert the data permanently using an UPDATE statement. However, you should experiment with different character sets (e.g., utf8, utf8mb4) to find the optimal encoding format for your data.

The above is the detailed content of Why are my Persian characters displaying incorrectly in my new script after migrating from an older database engine?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!