That's understandable, only one of them will work. Just a question: is the text really in Greek language? I don't know what your nationality is so I don't know if you're saying Greek meaning "some rubbish characters" or if you're saying Greek because it really is and should be Greek alphabet. (No offence here, people call dummy fill-in text "Lorem ipsum" "Greek".)

If you want to work with UTF-8 you have to work with UTF-8 only - you can't have a part in iso-8859-7 (or what is it that you have) and part in UTF-8. There's no point in saving from notepad in anything else than UTF-8, all of your HTML pages must be saved in UTF-8 etc.

For testing if the SQL is in UTF you don't have to upload it to server. Just change the extension to .html, open the file locally in your browser, change browser encoding do UTF and see what you got.


Well, you have to do both - all your files (that work with the UTF-8 content of your database) must both themselves be in UTF-8 and their meta charset must show that.

You're being imprecise. What "mysql" displays it right? phpMyAdmin? or you're logged into MySQL using default command line client? If yes then what operating system you run the client on (Windows? Or do you connect to your server via ssh and there you run the command line client?) Your client or something along the way may translate the encoding so you have to provide exact information.

For instance, phpMyAdmin itself runs in some encoding (you can change that, you should be using UTF-8 - check in your browser). Then when you import using phpMyAdmin (you still didn't tell me what you use for importing) you tell phpMyAdmin what the source encoding is. The attribute you import to must also be in UTF-8 otherwise it would normally display rubbish but your browser might change its encoding based on content auto-detection without you even noticing it.

I hope you're not copy/pasting the sql into something that doesn't run in UTF-8...

I do use Greek letters. My language is Greek.

I have found this link http://gr2.php.net/htmlentities is that useful ?

I tried to find the file that does this work (as i said is not developed by me)
and found this :



so i guess there must be something with this