Display_accents_with_mysql_php_apache_old_versions

The following is the outcome of a long struggle to make my system able to display accented characters properly. The versions I´m running are

kernel 2.4.25_pre7-gss-r11

apache 2.0.51

php 4.4.0

mysql 4.0.27-r1

I know that my system is old and deprecated, but I think I may be not the only one.

The problem I had was that I couldn´t make apache+php+mysql display accented characters properly. Since I wanted to solve this problem I googled for a solution.

The first advise I found was to upgrade my sql server from my version, which handles latin1 encoding only, to mysql 4.1 or above, as newer version accept UTF8 charset encoding. So I followed the Upgrade guide to MySQL 4.* or 5.0.*. Everything went fine until "# revdep-rebuild". As my system is very old the number of packages that needed to be changed were a lot. I tried to change some, but the list was neverending so I decided to stop the process and downgrade all changes to previous state.

When I was about to give up I found an unexpected and magical solution. I added

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

to my /etc/apache2/conf/apache2.conf and voila! all accented characters where there!

I hope this helps.