Problem inserting special Hungarian characters into db

Question

Hi,
I've posted this question in the database connection forum
but put it here too because I don't know where to fit better.
I read that it would be the most straightforward way to do
everything in UTF-8 because it handles well special characters so
I've tried to set up a simple testing environment. Besides I use CF
MX7 and my hosting provider creates the dsn for me so I think the
db driver is JDBC but not sure.
1.) In Dreamweaver I created a page with UTF-8 encoding set
the Unicode Normalization Form to "C" and checked the include
unicode signature (BOM) checkbox. This created a page with the meta
tag: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=utf-8" />. I've checked the HTTP header with an online
utility at delorie.com and it gave me the following info:
HTTP/1.1, Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8, Server:
Microsoft-IIS/6.0
2.) Then I put the following codes into the top of my page
before everything:
<cfprocessingdirective pageEncoding = "utf-8">
<cfset setEncoding("URL", "utf-8")>
<cfset setEncoding("FORM", "utf-8")>
<cfcontent type="text/html; charset=utf-8">
3.) I wrote some special Hungarian chars
(<p>őű</p>) into the page and they displayed
well all the time.
4.) I've created a simple MySQL db (MySQL Community Edition
5.0.27-community-nt) on my shared hosting server with phpMyAdmin
with default charset of UTF-8 and choosing utf8_hungarian_ci as
default collation. Then I creted a MyISAM table and the collation
was automatically applied to my varchar field into wich I stored
data with special chars. I've checked the properties of the MySQL
server in MySQL-Front prog and found the following settings under
the Variables tab: character_set_client: utf8,
character_set_connection: utf8, character_set_database: latin1,
character_set_results: utf8, character_set_server: latin1,
character_set_system: utf8, collation_connection: utf8_general_ci,
collation_database: latin1_swedish_ci, collation_server:
latin1_swedish_ci.
5.) I wrote a simple insert form into my page and tried it
using both the content of the form field and a hardcoded string
value and even tried to read back the value of the
#FORM.special_char# variable. In each cases the special Hungarian
chars changed to "q" or "p" letters.
Can anybody see something wrong in the above mentioned or
have an idea to test something else?
I am thinking about to try this same page against a db on my
other hosting providers MySQL server.
Here is the to the form:
http://209.85.117.174/pages/proba/chartest/utf8_1/form.cfm
Thanks, Aron

Answer 1

Some new info about the advancements in my project:
I've tried to make the insertion at a third hosting
provider's MySQL server with my 'everything is UTF-8' test case and
IT'S DONE! There are my lovely spec chars :-)
Then I've checked the char encoding according -Per's tip in
all of my so far used test MySQL dbs and it reported that
'CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_hungarian_ci' so this part seems to me
OK.
I asked my hosting provider where my production app should
run about the db driver and they told it's JDBC (what version of
Jconnect still donno') and they are ready to append
&characterSetResults=UTF-8 to the JDBC url connection string
(somebody told this tip also as a possible soultion) but they asked
me to provide the complete connection string to be used for my
datasource. I've tried to compose it in my localhost development
environment in ColdFusion Admin but it gave me a Connection
verification failed error. So I think I did something wrong and
need help to write the correct connection string that can be passed
to the hosting provider. So the connection string structure I tried
to use in the JDBC URL field of the datasource area of CFAdmin is
something like this:
jdbc:mysql://someipaddresshere/mydbname&characterSetResults=UTF-8
How can it be corrected?
Thanks, Aron