mysql - Arabic characters doesn't show in phpMyAdmin

Question

So I am currently working on a certain project where I need to create a database in which its records will hold both English and Arabic names.

I am creating this using PhpMyAdmin where it works perfectly fine for English names, however all the Arabic names appear as "?????".

To solve this issue I tried to use "set name 'utf8' ", however it didn't work. Googling this problem I realized that PhpMyAdmin does not support either Arabic or Special characters.

I am not sure if there is any workaround for this issue. Do you have any suggestion to solve it ?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

First, is your database capable of storing Unicode? SHOW CREATE TABLE table_name; will hopefully show your character set as utf8. If not this should fix it:

ALTER TABLE table_name DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Also make sure your PHPMyAdmin settings contain this:

$cfg['DefaultCharset'] = 'utf_8';
$cfg['DefaultConnectionCollation'] = 'utf8_general_ci';