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Solved: Drupal Cannot Display Chinese Characters (Unicodes)
Filed in: Open Source, Tips n Tricks, Web Development — May 12th, 2008
I have a community site powered by Drupal but it cannot display chinese characters, even though it supports unicode by default.
All non-English characters are displayed as question marks (???). I tried to reinstall Drupal but without any luck. Yesterday, I finally discovered the problem and solved it!
The problem
Last time, I installed Drupal using the cPanel Fantastico script installer. The installer created database using Latin collation. That’s why Drupal cannot display Chinese characters because the database is not unicode (UTF-8).
Lesson learned: Do not install script using cPanel Fantastico.
The solution
The solution is simple, correct the tables’ collation to UTF-8 using the following SQL query (thanks to neo_fox):
ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
I ran the query using phpMyAdmin found in cPanel hosting control panel. But the drawback is that you need to run the SQL query for every single table…
I modified 20+ tables and it works! Now my friends can leave chinese message on the community website. 
Tags: chinese, drupal, tips, unicode, utf8
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May 12th, 2008 at 1:15 am
What is the address of the site? would like to see what mr.liew is up to.
May 12th, 2008 at 4:21 am
Just a private community site for friends to rant. Nothing serious there
May 12th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
good info. thou’ im not going to use the chinese characters, but this helps me handling php scripts out there. thanks
May 12th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
I think wordpress has this problem as well. Have not fix my wordpress yet so that I can blog in chinese..
May 13th, 2008 at 3:43 am
@Alien TYC: wordpress has a different solution. Check out “Fix Wrong Encoding after Upgrade Wordpress 2.2“
May 15th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
I m your friend?what is the site URL?
July 30th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
It’s not working for me;/ Maybe I’m doing something wrong but what?
August 18th, 2008 at 3:04 am
Thx dude! This article help me to solve same problem with russian language!