Why Are My Persian Characters Displaying Incorrectly in My New Codeigniter Website, Despite Using UTF-8 Encoding?

Strange Character Encoding of Stored Data: Old Script Shows Fine, New Script Doesn't

A developer encountered a peculiar issue while rewriting an old website in Persian, which uses Perso/Arabic characters. The problem involved a discrepancy in character encoding when storing and fetching data from the database.

Database Configuration and Character Encoding

The prior script used a database engine called TUBADBENGINE to manage data that was stored with the character encoding "utf8_persian_ci." The new script, coded with Codeigniter, also had "utf8" and "utf8_persian_ci" as its character set and collation settings.

Unintended Character Conversion

However, upon entering Persian characters into the database with the old script, they were displayed differently in the new script. The old script correctly displayed the characters as intended, but the new one exhibited a strange representation.

Digging deeper, it was discovered that the data stored in the database was in what appeared to be an erroneous format. Inserting the Persian characters "aaaaaa" resulted in "عمراÙ" being stored.

When fetching this data in the new script, it was displayed as "عمراÙ." However, the old script still displayed it correctly as "aaaaaa."

Investigating the Cause

The root of the issue was discovered after further analysis: the database connection used in the old script was mistakenly set to use the latin1 character encoding, despite the database and tables being configured with utf8_persian_ci.

This resulted in the following process:

1. The new script sent the Persian characters in UTF-8 format over a latin1-encoded database connection.
2. The database received and stored the characters according to the latin1 encoding, which resulted in the mangled representation.
3. When the new script fetched the data, it interpreted the latin1-encoded characters as UTF-8, further exacerbating the issue.

Solution

To resolve this problem, the data in the database had to be converted to the correct character encoding. The following query was used for this conversion:

SELECT CONVERT(BINARY CONVERT(field_name USING latin1) USING utf8) FROM table_name

After converting the data, the new script could correctly display the Persian characters.

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