CakePHP and Encoding Problems – Solves International and Word Special Chars

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:05:49 +0000

So, embarrassingly I have been putting up with this for years and just never could quite put a finger on how to handle it. The situation is this: You have some sort of content management system (CMS) setup for your client that you have made homebrew (or not maybe). You’ve painstakingly put time into security, format, ease of use, etc and you hand them the rains. Two hours later you get a call that they have some ‘weird code’ on their about page. You look and you realize they have copied and pasted some special chars from Word. What to do?

Maybe this is the jerk way of handling it but I always had users copy and paste from word into a flat text file, then copy and paste into the form. Or, I would use TinyMCE in the CMS and have their Cleaner plugin handle it. Most of the time that seems to work but not always. Today, I hit the wall on this problem with CakePHP and had to figure it out. Essentially, it all comes down to page and database encoding.

The short explanation: Set everything to UTF-8 at the beginning of your project. The long explanation (which is just a rehash of this awesome post at missingfeatures.com):

Set your mySQL database up with UTF-8 encoding. This includes:
1. The database itself
2. The tables
3. Every field (watch out for this one in phpmyadmin because if you have already created your table you’ll need to specifically change the collation for all text, varchar, and char fields)
In your layouts:
1. Put this at the top:
2. Put this in the head: charset(’utf-8′); ?>
In your database configuration file (app/config/database.php):
1. Add this to your default database array: ‘encoding’ => ‘utf8′

This puts everything on the same encoding plane and allows for characters like: ü ß ☠ ☮ ☯ ♠ Ω ♤ ♣ ♧ ♥ ♡ ♦ ♢ ♔ ♕ ♚ ♛ ⚜ ★ ☆ ✮ ✯ ☄ ☾ ☽ ☼ ☀ ☁ ☂ ☃ ☻ ☺ ☹ ۞ ۩

Professional GeoCoding Service

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:36:14 +0000

If you have more than a couple thousand records you want to geocode all at once we found a great service from USC’s GIS department that allows you to geocode records in an Access database. It’s not terribly fast but we were able to geocode nearly 200,000 records in a couple of days. Just make sure your computer isn’t set to go to sleep an hour after you step away from the computer…. :/

https://webgis.usc.edu/Default.aspx

Deleting from multiple tables in mySQL

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:31:37 +0000

DELETE users.*, profiles.*
FROM users u, profiles prof
WHERE u.id = prof.user_id
AND u.created < '2009-01-01'

Finding and Clearing Orphans

admin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:06:33 +0000

DELETE orphan_table FROM orphan_table
LEFT JOIN user_table
ON orphan_table.user_id = user_table.id
WHERE user_table.id IS NULL;

Dolbex » MySQL

CakePHP and Encoding Problems – Solves International and Word Special Chars

Professional GeoCoding Service

Deleting from multiple tables in mySQL

Finding and Clearing Orphans