Tekker Blog

So, because the office was closed today, I had the option to work at home so I didn’t lose 8 hours pay.  Great idea! So, I make sure to copy the code and database backup of my project before I left work the other night.  Get up today to start working.

Sweet! Oh ya, I got to install Visual Studio 2008. No problem, I’ll grab my copy of my file server and install it.  LOLWUT? Can’t copy file 67 of 71? Fine, I go find another copy.  2 hours later, it’s installed.

Time to install Sql 2008 Express.  Run setup. Wut? .Net framework 3.5 needs to be installed.  I thought that came with Visual Studio 2008? Anyway, download it and install it.  Rerun Sql Express setup.  Now I gotta have Windows Installer 4.5.  WTF? Just install! So, download that and install it.  Run Sql Express setup AGAIN. OMFG! I need Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 installed! FINE. Download it, run it.  Wow, it took 50 minutes to install the damn service pack.  Funny, installing THE ENTIRE DAMN VISUAL STUDIO APPLICATION BUNDLE TOOK 20 MINUTES, but a service pack takes 50?

Nice going Microsoft.  What should have taken no longer than an hour has now taken me damn near 5.

Again, I was working on a client project (the same project as this post) on my Windows workstation running AppServ. I ran across some unicode that I needed to insert into MySQL. Did it work? You guessed it, it sure didn’t! Turns out things like © and ® are not things php+mysql care for.  I found a few suggestions while googling to “SET NAMES utf8;” and “SET CHARACTER SET utf8;” after connecting to the database.  It didn’t work.

Example:

CREATE TABLE `blah` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`blah` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

php code:

mysql_connect('localhost', 'blah', 'blah') || die (mysql_error());
mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8;');
mysql_query('SET CHARACTER SET utf8');
mysql_select_db('blah') || die (mysql_error());
mysql_query('insert into blah (blah) values (\'this © and this ® suck\')') || die (mysql_error());

The result of the insert was was ‘this ‘.  It cuts the string off at ©.

I ended up just replacing the extra tags with super coding skills like str_replace(‘©', '').  I am aware of the different stuff that php has to break that down to © and ®. However I was dealing with urls that had these characters in it and running those functions against the whole string would do fun things like turn & into & and what happens if you already have an & in the url because a value is already url encoded?

Fun times.  Fun times indeed.