在同一PHP文件上使用具有不同归类的两个不同数据库

Question

I'm not entirely sure the title for this question is accurate, but it's my best guess. Here is my scenario in more details.

I have a MediaWiki based website with content in Spanish. This site has its own data base. The special characters from the Spanish language render properly on the browser.

I have now added a PHP plugin to display popup messages. This plugin has its own database. I have stored special Spanish characters on this database successfully (I can see from phpMyAdmin the special characters are there), but when I pull data from this database to render on the user's browser the special characters are replaced by

You can see this issue live here http://es.wikiarquitectura.com/index.php/La_Ricarda_-_Casa_Gomis

Doing some reaseach I found somebody suggesting to add this to the file header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1');

When I add the above line of code the popup text renders properly, but it's then the main content's special characters that are broken.

Any idea how to get the content from both databases to render properly?

Answer 1

I found the solution to my problem.

The way to fix it was to specify the charset that should be used when connecting to the second data base (the plugin's database). See below

//connection to the database
$dbhandle = mysql_connect($hostname, $username, $password) 
    or die("Unable to connect to MySQL");
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$dbhandle);

The fourth line of the above did the trick :)