How to Insert Arabic Characters in MySQL
Modifying your MySQL database to use the UTF-8 character set is important if you want to store Arabic characters in your database. UTF-8 is an encoding for the Unicode character set, which includes the Arabic alphabet. Before inserting Arabic text you have to make sure the MySQL database, tables and columns are using the UTF-8 character set. Modifying the database is done with the "ALTER" keyword. The application you are inserting from also needs to use UTF-8.
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Instructions
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Log in to the MySQL database. Using a terminal this is done with the command:
mysql -u username -p password
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Alter the MySQL database, tables and any text columns that you are going to insert Arabic characters into with the UTF-8 character set and collate using the commands:
ALTER my_database
CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci
ALTER my_table t1
CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci
ALTER my_table t1 MODIFY
my_column VARCHAR(100)
CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci
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Check the character set configuration of the application you're inserting data with to make sure it's using UTF-8. For example, if you are using PHP and HTML, add the PHP header "header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8' );" at the top of your file, include the HTML meta-tag "<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>" in the HTML <head> section and call the "mysql_set_charset('utf8',$my_db_link)" function after connecting to the database.
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Insert Arabic characters with the following MySQL command:
INSERT INTO my_table (my_column) VALUES ('my_string')
Replace "my_string" with your Arabic string.
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References
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