phpMyAdmin complaining about mbstring and mcrypt

sneakyimp · 10-15-2007, 08:25 PM

so I think I have my phpMyAdmin installed properly, but it is complaining about a couple of things that I fear may have wider relevance in my wider MySQL universe:

complaint 1

Code:

The mbstring PHP extension was not found and you seem to be using a multibyte charset. Without the mbstring extension phpMyAdmin is unable to split strings correctly and it may result in unexpected results.

complaint 2

Code:

Cannot load mcrypt extension. Please check your PHP configuration.

Can anyone shed some light on this? What does it mean 'using a multibyte charset'? Is that a MySQL config or a phpmyadmin config?

bathory · 10-17-2007, 06:11 AM

mbstring is a php extension to support multibyte characters (such as chinese etc)
mcrpyt is another php extension that support various encryption algorithms.
If your mysql databases use tables with multibyte characters, then you must enable mbstring support in php. As for mcrypt I guess it's used by phpmyadmin to encrypt passwords, etc.
To check if your php installation has support for these extensions, you can run:

Code:

php -i|grep mbstring
php -i|grep mcrypt

These extensions can be installed from source adding " --enable-mbstring" and "--with-mcrypt" to the ./configure script, or if you're using an rpm based distro by installing php-mbstring, php-mcrypt packages

sneakyimp · 10-17-2007, 02:04 PM

OK latest update, I installed both extensions on my CentOS 5 box using yum and then restarting apache.

Code:

yum install php-mbstring
yum install php-mcrypt
service httpd restart

So it was obviously phpMyAdmin complaining about certain modules being missing in php. HOWEVER, It says "you seem to be using a multibyte character set". What on earth is 'using a multibyte character set'? Is it a MySQL setting? a PHP setting? A table within MySQL?

bathory · 10-18-2007, 02:17 AM

AFAIK mysql uses by default the latin-1 encoding, so tables with mulitbyte characters (such as chinese, japanese etc) are not manipulated correctly. So I guess this was just a phpmyadmin warning to inform you about this issue.
If you want more info, read about mbstring and about mysql charsets

sneakyimp · 10-18-2007, 10:30 AM

Thanks!