Wordpress and Unicode

You type some non-English character in Wordpress or Drupal editors. You save it only to find those characters have become ????. If this describes your problem, then you have an issue with Unicode. You need to turn on Unicode support for Wordpress and Drupal. It will require some change of code. Basically, both Wordpress and Drupal supports Unicode. However, by default, the databases are not configured to store unicode characters.

Wordprss

For Wordpres, the modification is straight-forward.

1. Open up ‘wp-config.php’ from the root directory of your WordPress installation.


2. Comment out the following lines by adding ‘//’ at the very beginning of the following two lines:
   define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

So that section should now look like this:

//define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
//define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

[Source: http://hansengel.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/wordpress-unicode-and-s/]

Drupal

For Drupal, the change is a bit more involved:

1. Go to to the root directory of your Drupal installation.


2. Save the following code in a file named collate_db.php


3. 
   

   <?php
   # Do not change anything below this ( :-) <- Rewwrite Editors note.)
   require_once("includes/bootstrap.inc");
   require_once("includes/database.inc");
   require_once("includes/database.mysql.inc");
   $connect_url = 'mysql://user:pwd@server/database';
   $active_db = db_connect($connect_url);
   $sql = 'SHOW TABLES';
   if ( !( $result = db_query( $sql ) ) ) {
         echo '<span >Get SHOW TABLE - SQL Error: ' . $result . '<br>' . "</span>\n";
      }
   
   while ( $tables = db_fetch_array($result) ) {
      echo $tables[0];
   # Loop through all tables in this database
     $table = $tables[key($tables)];
   
     if ( !( $result2 = db_query("ALTER TABLE %s COLLATE utf8_general_ci", $table) ) ) {
          echo '<span >UTF SET - SQL Error: <br>' . "</span>\n";
   
            break;
             }
   
     print "$table changed to UTF-8 successfully.<br>\n";
   
     # Now loop through all the fields within this table
     if ( !($result2 = db_query("SHOW COLUMNS FROM %s",$table) ) ) {
            echo '<span >Get Table Columns Query - SQL Error: <br>' . "</span>\n";
   
            break;
             }
   
     while ( $column = db_fetch_array( $result2 ) )
     {
        $field_name = $column['Field'];
        $field_type = $column['Type'];
   
        # Change text based fields
        $skipped_field_types = array('char', 'text', 'enum', 'set');
   
        foreach ( $skipped_field_types as $type )
        {
           if ( strpos($field_type, $type) !== false )
           {
              $sql4 = "ALTER TABLE $table CHANGE `$field_name` `$field_name` $field_type CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin";
              $result4 = db_query($sql4);
   
              echo "---- $field_name changed to UTF-8 successfully.<br>\n";
           }
        }
     }
     echo "<hr>\n";
   }
   ?>
   

   
   


4. Look at the red line in the code in red (5th line). You have to replace that part with your installation-specific information.


5. Open the file sites/default/settings.php under the same Drupal root directory. Copy the rest of the line of
   

   $db_url =

   
   and paste it after
   

   $connect_url = 

   
   in the above code.


6. Save collate_db.php


7. Open a browser window and request the collate_db.php from your browser.


8. If everything is fine you would see something similar to this:
   access changed to UTF-8 successfully.
   ---- mask changed to UTF-8 successfully.
   ---- type changed to UTF-8 successfully.
   

   ---

   <--- Lines not shown --->
   

   ---

   watchdog changed to UTF-8 successfully.
   ---- type changed to UTF-8 successfully.
   ---- message changed to UTF-8 successfully.
   ---- variables changed to UTF-8 successfully.
   ---- link changed to UTF-8 successfully.
   ---- location changed to UTF-8 successfully.
   ---- referer changed to UTF-8 successfully.
   ---- hostname changed to UTF-8 successfully.
   

   ---



9. Delete collate_db.php for security.

You are done.

[Source: http://www.urbannatives.net/localtreechild/..._ci_and_tabl ]