Category: Tech

While using PHP to display web pages drawing on a MySQL database, I’ve had some difficulty with strings in non-English characters.  In my case, it happened to be Inuktitut syllabics.  Most text seemed to display properly, but some didn’t.  Ultimately, I found the simple solution, was I needed to enable the “mbstring” extension in PHP, and … Continue reading PHP/MySQL Multibyte Characters

I’ve recently had to import a large Excel spreadsheet into MySQL.  Of course, there’s lots of ways of doing this, and most of the time, it’s a rather trivial thing to do.  That is, it’s easy if you have English characters and single-line text fields. Approach 1:  CSV.  This is often the “go to” approach … Continue reading Importing Excel spreadsheet into MySQL

How I used php and CSS to ensure my HTML tables worked with fixed width columns, with varying data in them.

I’m using Apache OpenOffice Base 4 with MySQL 5.6.  I noticed some question marks appeared where I should have seen some non-English characters (inuit characters).  I had set up the database properly to use UTF-8.  But, it turned out I used the ANSI ODBC driver.  Switching to the Unicode Driver easily fixed the problem.

How I resolved a problem with MySQL, inserting a record with auto-increment.