CRG

Again my sincere thanks for all your help

Thank you so much for your help The data base, tables and all car columns had all been converted to utf8. I have now added mysqli_set_charset($dbc, 'utf8'); as suggested and now the results in my php web page all show correctly. Thank you for your patience with me. Mr Ullman - perhaps in the next edition a few more notes about this subject.

Please excuse my ignorance but where would I do that? I have from other advise pages set the utf8 in the php config files and the mysql files and am looking into the means os confirming it when opening the database. What (to my mind) in the era of international trade should be so simple, is proving to be an absolute minefield.

Many thanks to those who have responded. I converted the mysql collation to utf8 general, added the meta http-equiv content to charset urf-8 and placed the code if (preg_match('/^[A-Za-z\x{00C1}\x{00C8}\x{00C9}\x{00CA}\x{00E1}\x{00E8}\x{00E9}\x{00EA} \'.-]{2,40}$/u',$trimmed['last_name'])) This worked and accepted the match. So far so good. But when I looked at the mysql db, the word Carré had been stored as CarrĀ© Where did that come from?

Looking at it again and comparing with what I have if (preg_match ('/^[A-Za-zé \'.-]{2,40}$/i', $trimmed['last_name'])) So what I gleaned from another site isn't going to do what I want. I want to match the "approved characters" with the last_name field, the approved characters must include ÁÈÉáèé Colin

Thanks for reply I found most of the responses to the google search difficult to understand However this appears to do what I want $_foreign = "ÁÈÉáèé"; if(preg_match('/[^a-zA-Z0-9_-]+/', $_foreign)) Would you concur? Colin

Thanks to this book I have got a multiple access mailing list database ready to go, subject to the ISP server being updated. Before it goes live, I have to deal with accents. Being just off the coast of France, many names have é ê ë etc and the pregmatch facility listed in chapter 16 throws these out completely. I am assuming that our Canadian friends must have already addressed this problem, so I hope someone will be able to supply a pattern match that will allow e and a with accents to be approved. Colin