SQL - problem storing Irish names

[Morlan]

I've been Googling this for the past hour and can't seem to find a very simple solution to this prob.

I have a field in SQL - VARCHAR(255) with latin_swedish_ci coalition (the default). I get these odd chars when posting strings with apostrophes or accents.

Example. O'Brien is stored as O\'Brien
Siobhán is stored as SiobhÃn
Éire is stored as Ãire.

I've tried changing the coalition for the field but nothing seems to work.

Do I need to format the strings in PHP before inserting to SQL?

Thanks guys.

 

[Morlan]

Just what I was looking for. Thanks man.

I'll post back here once I've sorted the problem.

 

[Morlan]

The problem I'm having is actually the responding server (Payment Gateway)

I send POST data to the Payment Gateway

<input type=hidden name="firstName" value="Siobhán">

and it sends it back as SiobhÃn in the response.

Also, é comes back as é, and so on.

Is it possible decode the garbled string back to UTF without have to use str_replace?

 

[Morlan]

It doesn't work for some characters.

É, for example, is sent back from the payment gateway as É

echo utf8_decode("É") outputs as �? (two questions marks, not É)


What I'd really like to know is what type of encoding (or whatever) the server is sending back to me. There must be an easy way to convert back to UTF8 without having to manually str_replace everything.

I just don't know what I should be searching for on Google - searching for these weird characters is proving difficult.

 

[Morlan]

I don't think this is going to work.

í, Á and Í are sent back as Ã, at least, I can't see any difference between them in Firefox.

á = á
é = é
í = Ã*
ó = ó
ú = ú

Á = Ã
É = É
Í = Ã
Ó = Ó
Ú = Ú

How odd. I just don't understand it.