utf-8 and database connection

in some cases when database and document charset is set to utf-8, the foreign-chars will displayed as question-marks

a soluten could be the following code change in includes\classes\db\mysql\query_factory.php

  function connect($zf_host, $zf_user, $zf_password, $zf_database, $zf_pconnect = 'false', $zp_real = false) {
//@TODO error class required to virtualise & centralise all error reporting/logging/debugging
    $this->database = $zf_database;
    if (!function_exists('mysql_connect')) die ('Call to undefined function: mysql_connect().  Please install the MySQL Connector for PHP');
    if ($zf_pconnect != 'false') {
      $this->link = @mysql_connect($zf_host, $zf_user, $zf_password, true);
    } else {
    // pconnect disabled ... leaving it as "connect" here instead of "pconnect"
      $this->link = @mysql_connect($zf_host, $zf_user, $zf_password, true);
    }
    if ($this->link) {
      if (@mysql_select_db($zf_database, $this->link)) {
        $this->db_connected = true;
        /** set utf-8 database connection
            look at: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-connection.html
            &&: http://www.adviesenzo.nl/examples/php_mysql_charset_fix/
            &&: http://de.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-set-charset.php
        */
        $sql = "SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set_database'";
        $res = $this->Execute($sql);
        $charset = $res->fields['Value'];
        $sql = "SET NAMES $charset";
        $this->Execute($sql);
        return true;
      } else {
        $this->set_error(mysql_errno(),mysql_error(), $zp_real);
        return false;
      }
    } else {
      $this->set_error(mysql_errno(),mysql_error(), $zp_real);
      return false;
    }
  }

this should be really implemented, Zen Cart is one of the applications which is not able to handle MySQL encoding correctly and this little patch will fully fix it. BTW, i recommend to use "SET CHARACTER SET $charset" instead, it's much better for this.

why to use SET NAMES
look at: http://de.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-set-charset.php message from 4.3.2008

Using the function provided by Janez and nag worked fine for SELECTs, but with INSERT and UPDATE the non-ascii characters got converted into question marks. To fix this, I replaced SET CHARACTER SET with SET NAMES (ref: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-connection.html). So the function becomes:

just read the MySQL docs here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-connection.html
and you will understand why to use SET CHARACTER SET instead of SET NAMES (the message from php.net is stupid and not true). i'm useing SET CHARACTER SET many years without problems.