Quick Background: I inherited a large SQL dump file containing a combination of English and Arabic text, and (I think) it was originally exported using 'latin1'. I changed all occurrences of 'latin1' to 'utf8' prior to importing the file. The Arabic text didn't appear correctly in phpMyAdmin (which I guess is normal), but when I loaded the text to a web page with the following, everything looked good and the arabic text displayed perfectly.:
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=windows-1256'/> Problem: My client is picky and doesn't want to change his
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>to the 'Windows-1256' equivalent. I didn't think this would be a problem, but when I changed the charset value to 'UTF-8', all the Arabic characters appeared as diamonds with question marks. Shouldn't UTF-8 display Arabic text correctly?
Here are a few notes about my database configuration:
- Database charset is 'utf8'
- Database connection collation is 'utf8_general_ci'
- All databases, tables, and applicable fields have been collated as 'utf8_general_ci'