CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphtmlmysqlencodingcharacter-encoding
Force Flow
Force Flow

Reputation: 724

Strange character appearing in text in mysql

In VARCHAR and TEXT MySQL database datatypes, I keep seeing  characters appear before every single space after the content is inserted or updated from HTML TEXTAREA fields.

When I vardump the PHP data prior to an insert/update, the  characters aren't there.

I tried converting the database and tables from the default collation of latin1_swedish_ci to utf8_general_ci encoding, then inserting/updating the data again, but the  characters still appeared in the text before each space.

I honestly don't have a very good grasp on collation and character encoding and thought things would be fine when left as default, but then I encountered this issue. How can I prevent these extra characters from appearing?

[edit]: If I update text to the database the first time, the extra characters do not appear. If I load the text from the database field and then update it a second time, then the  characters appear.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2265

Answers (3)

Force Flow
Force Flow

Reputation: 724

It turns out that there was problem with the PHP library I was using to generate the input/textarea fields. For the textarea fields, it was replacing all the spaces in the value with nbsp special characters. So, things went a bit wonky when storing and re-storing that value to the database. I disabled that feature.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to offer your suggestions.

Upvotes: 1

Christian Ezeani
Christian Ezeani

Reputation: 350

I think you might have some hidden non-ascii in the text/html. Perhaps you should try using

$text= str_replace('`', "'", $text);
$text= preg_replace("/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/",' ', $text);

to strip non-ascii characters before you insert it into the database.

Upvotes: 1

va5ja
va5ja

Reputation: 473

Try to execute SET NAMES 'utf8' on database init. Also check the encoding of your PHP files.

Upvotes: 1

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