Solved: Drupal Cannot Display Chinese Characters (Unicodes)
Filed in: Open Source, Tips, 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. 
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