Feb 18
I just had a strange error in a piece of PHP code. It should query a MySQL database and render an HTML selectbox out of the result. Sadly, the selectbox had exactly one entry less than the table! This entry was unique - it had an umlaut as first character and that was the clue for me: the encoding!
The database table was encoded in latin1_swedish... and the file was utf8. Initially I thought: well, if I use utf8, I'm quite safe but I was wrong - obviously. Then I used Eclipse and saved the file with iso-8859-1 encoding and hurray: it worked!
What I found confusing about this, was the fact that this very sql statement returned the completely correct result when entered in phpMyAdmin! Seems like the file encoding there was correct rightaway.
