Special characters in PHP MySQL statement

Question

I have some special characters stored in a MySQL database. Specifically ®. I want to SELECT all entries with these characters. I am currently using this statement:

mysql_query("SELECT * FROM table WHERE description LIKE '%®%' OR name LIKE '%®%'");

It returns 0 entries. When i try something with %a% it returns a lot so I know everything is right, it is just some kind of a charset problem or something.

When I echo "®" it returns "å¨".

Also when I do the exact same query in phpmyadmin it works properly. Please help!

Answer 1

Read this its very help full to you

Just simply add those symbols to your text, and execute it as SQL query:

INSERT INTO tbl_name VALUES ("Here's my text: ©®");

When you want to display it one the website don't do anything with these symbols (but remember to escape at least <, >, & (using htmlspecialchars()) cause those has special meaning in XML/SGML (HTML) documents)

PS. Also remember to escape text passed to SQL query using mysql_real_escape_string() to avoid any SQL Injection problems. If your server has magic_quotes_gpc enabled disable it or at least filter your GET/POST/COOKIE data to its raw value. You should always consciously escape values. EDIT:

According to your comment... I don't remember whether magic_quotes_gpc are enabled by default but you can easily undone magic quotes effect. Just on the very beginning of your PHP code add something like this:

if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
  array_walk_recursive($_GET, 'stripslashes');
  array_walk_recursive($_POST, 'stripslashes');
  array_walk_recursive($_COOKIE, 'stripslashes');
}

Now each GPC value should be always raw - without quotes - so you have to escape it manually before passing any variable into query.