Problem inserting text with special Hungarian characters into MySQL database

Question

When I insert text into my MySQL db the special Hungarian
characters (ő,ű) they change into "?".
When I check the
<cfoutput>#FORM.special_character#</cfoutput> it gives
me the correct text, things go wrong just when writing it into the
db. My hosting provider said the following: "please try to
evidently specify "latin2" charset with "latin2_hungarian_ci"
collation when performing any operations with tables. It is
supported by the server but not used by default." At my former
hosting provider I had no such problem. Anyway how could I do what
my hosting provider has suggested. I read a PHP related article
that said use "SET NAMES latin2". How could I do such thing in
ColdFusion? Any suggestion? Besides I've tried to use UTF8 and
Latin2 character encoding both on my pages and in the db but with
not much success.
I've also read a French language message here in this forum
that suggested to use:
<cfscript>
setEncoding("form", "utf-8");
setEncoding("url", "utf-8");
</cfscript>
<cfcontent type="text/html; charset=utf-8">
I' ve changed the utf-8 to latin2 and even to iso-8859-2 but
didn't help.
Thanks, Aron

Answer 1

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