Why Do My Persian Characters Display Differently Between Old and New Website Scripts?

Strange Character Encoding Discrepancy in Data Storage and Retrieval

In an effort to rewrite an old website that utilizes Persian characters, you've faced an odd discrepancy between the way data is stored and retrieved. The old script displays Persian characters correctly, while the new one exhibits them with the same encoding as the database, which appears distorted.

To understand this issue, it's important to note:

• The old script relies on the TUBADBENGINE, which employs a distinct mechanism for character encoding.
• The new script utilizes CodeIgniter, which handles character encoding differently.
• The database is configured with a UTF-8 character set and the utf8_persian_ci collation.

When you input Persian characters using the old script, they appear as strange sequences like عمران in the database. However, the old script retrieves and displays them correctly. This suggests that TUBADBENGINE employs a separate encoding scheme, possibly based on ISO-8859-1, which isn't recognized by the new script.

Conversely, if you directly insert Persian characters into the database, they are stored as expected and retrieved correctly by the new script. However, the old script now displays them as question marks (????). This is because the old script's character decoding mechanism expects a different encoding than what is utilized by the database for direct insertions.

The solution lies in converting the existing data in the database from the encoding used by TUBADBENGINE to the UTF-8 encoding expected by CodeIgniter. To accomplish this:

1. Adjust the database connection to ensure it uses UTF-8 encoding.
2. Convert the data in the affected columns using the CONVERT function. For example:

UPDATE tnewsgroups SET fName = CONVERT(INARY CONVERT(fName USING latin1) USING utf8);

Once the data is converted, both the new and old scripts should display Persian characters correctly.

The above is the detailed content of Why Do My Persian Characters Display Differently Between Old and New Website Scripts?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!