MySQL and PHP: Multibyte Character Support

Magsol · 04-08-2005, 08:37 AM

Hello everyone!

Only recently (I think), whenever I load up phpmyadmin to do some database maintenance, I find that, after logging in, there's some red text at the bottom of the screen that says this:

Quote:

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

I am using phpmyadmin version 2.6.1-pl2, MySQL version 4.1.10-standard, and PHP version 5.0.3. The MySQL charset is UTF-8 Unicode.

I did a little bit of research on PHP's website into the multibyte char library, and it looks like this is something that comes standard on every installation of PHP - it only requires activation at time of compilation. However, I could not determine how to set up the multibyte character function library in a post-installation environment. Is there some setting in the php.ini file that can be changed to enable multibye char support? Will I need to reconfigure and recompile PHP to enable it?

And guidance and suggestions are much appreciated!

Magsol · 04-08-2005, 01:44 PM

This is the section of the php.ini file that deals with the mbstring library:

Quote:

[mbstring]
; language for internal character representation.
;mbstring.language = Japanese

; internal/script encoding.
; Some encoding cannot work as internal encoding.
; (e.g. SJIS, BIG5, ISO-2022-*)
;mbstring.internal_encoding = EUC-JP

; http input encoding.
;mbstring.http_input = auto

; http output encoding. mb_output_handler must be
; registered as output buffer to function
;mbstring.http_output = SJIS

; enable automatic encoding translation accoding to
; mbstring.internal_encoding setting. Input chars are
; converted to internal encoding by setting this to On.
; Note: Do _not_ use automatic encoding translation for
; portable libs/applications.
;mbstring.encoding_translation = Off

; automatic encoding detection order.
; auto means
;mbstring.detect_order = auto

; substitute_character used when character cannot be converted
; one from another
;mbstring.substitute_character = none;

; overload(replace) single byte functions by mbstring functions.
; mail(), ereg(), etc are overloaded by mb_send_mail(), mb_ereg(),
; etc. Possible values are 0,1,2,4 or combination of them.
; For example, 7 for overload everything.
; 0: No overload
; 1: Overload mail() function
; 2: Overload str*() functions
; 4: Overload ereg*() functions
;mbstring.func_overload = 0

None of these seem intuitive, by which I mean "Enable mbstring support." Am I just missing what I'm looking for, or do I need to completely reinstall PHP to enable its support? Or is it something else entirely? :-P

Thanks!

Magsol · 04-09-2005, 09:21 AM

No one knows?...

cjs500 · 04-19-2005, 08:36 PM

If you are running Linux you will need to recompile with the --enable-mbstring. I find its better to compile the binary package rather than using the RPM installer packages. If you use the RPM's, check you phpinfo option in phpMyAdmin to see if the configuration includes --enable-mbstring.

I ran my install using the following:

./configure --enable-mysql --with-apache2=/path_to_apache/bin/apxs --enable-mbstring
make
make install

After I recompiled the PHP build it worked fine.

If you are running it on a Windows OS you may need to get the DLL's from the binary package for windows and include them in the windows\system32 folder or root or you php directory. This being a guess. I am a windows guy but I don't run it on a Windows OS. Not as good.

Good Luck!

greenhornet · 04-26-2005, 10:24 PM

I'm using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and the php rpm does not have mbstring support by default.

However there is an RPM package "php-mbstring" that will provide it.

From the RPM file
"The php-mbstring package contains a dynamic shared object that will add
support for multi-byte string handling to PHP"