PHP Mysql UTF8 arabic CRUD database

To read ,write and sort Arabic text in mysql database using php correctly, make sure that:

1- MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
2- MySQL connection collation: utf8_general_ci
3- your database and table collations are set to: utf8_general_ci or utf8_unicode_ci

Then, add this code in your php database connect script :

mysql_query(“SET NAMES ‘utf8′”);
mysql_query(‘SET CHARACTER SET utf8’);

For Example :

function connect() /* {{{ */
{
if (isset($this->dbh)) {

mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'", $this->dbh);
mysql_query("set names utf8 ", $this->dbh);
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
mysql_query('SET CHARACTER SET utf8');
return true;
}

Create an UTF8 mysql databases

Create an unicode database with the collation utf8_ci_general :

CREATE TABLE `t1_test` (
`c1_utf8` varchar(50) character set utf8 default NULL,
`c2_eng` varchar(50) default NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

--
-- Dumping data for table `t1_test`
--

INSERT INTO `t1_test` VALUES ('كيف الحال', 'test2');

To have the right display for arabic under your browser for a unicode database :
In case of a PHP APACHE script:

<?php header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8"); ?>

In case of an HTML page :

 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Now you can create a small script to test the output or go directly in phpmyAdmin.
Cheers,