Hey, does anyone know how to save special characters in a mysql database? for example when a username contains ä, it shows up in the mysql database as "?"...

That's a database encoding issue - or you are handling the text using ASCII encoding before you store it. Likely the former though.

You could use utf8_general_ci in mysql (4.1/5.0). It should help for multilanguage signs.

Quote from Simpson :

You could use utf8_general_ci in mysql (4.1/5.0). It should help for multilanguage signs.

This man speaks truth.

well I found out that my database is in latin1, but how can I change it to utf8? I don't find anywhere to put it. Googled it and they say I need to edit my.ini, but since my database is hosted on a external webhost, wich I don't manager, this is a problem... Is there another option?

Changing you database from Latin1 to UTF8 will not convert the char , but will simple instruct the collation char are into UTF8 who was not truth when char where saved, so you probaly screw some char into the process.

a simple ALTER TABLE should to the job or ALTER COLULM, since you can put a table latin1 and a column utf8 as example.

Read MySQL manual for "Collation" , they will show you many way to retrive a char with custom collation choices, can be usefull before doing your convert , like UPDATE first and ALTER after.

read read read! Mysql book is well done and all answer you search are there and can be retrive from the search option easy!

many ppl has probleme with MySQL Latin1 collation and Site WWW, cause they site WWW send header as UTF8 content, if your probleme is related to WWW display, i sugest you change your apache setting in place to put default header at latin1.

Well the thing is, that when a user joins on my insim, his special char gets saved as ?, tho if I add them trough phpmyadmin, it works just fine... Perhaps it's a C# problem (I thought it was default unicode?)