how to insert special character in mysql via php a

Question

how to insert special characters into a database(MySQL) like

Registered symbol ( ® ) OR Copyright sign ( © ) OR Trade Mark sign ( ™ )

Also I want to display as original on the html page.

What I have to do in both side (front end and back end), please elaborate

Which function is more effective?

Method 1:

$_GET = array_map('trim', $_GET);
$_POST = array_map('trim', $_POST);

if(get_magic_quotes_gpc()){
  $_GET = array_map('stripslashes', $_GET);
  $_POST = array_map('stripslashes', $_POST);  

  $_GET = array_map('strip_tags', $_GET);
  $_POST = array_map('strip_tags', $_POST);  
 }
 else{
  $_GET = array_map('mysql_real_escape_string', $_GET);
  $_POST = array_map('mysql_real_escape_string', $_POST);   
 }

Method 2:

  foreach ($_POST as $key=>$value){
        if (!get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
          return addslashes(htmlentities(strip_tags($value),ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8'));
          } 
          else {
             return htmlentities(strip_tags($value),ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8');
          }
  }

I am a bit confused what is the difference between

htmlentities() and htlspecialchars(), and which one i have to use?

which function should be used addslashes() or stripslashes() when insert into database?

Answer 1

For starters, you should just use mysql_real_escape_string when inserting into the database - this will ensure that whatever you store is safely encoded, yet retains all of the original information.

In terms of output, the key difference between htmlentities and htmlspecialchars is that htmlentities will convert all characters that have entities whereas htmlspecialchars will only convert <, >, &, ", '

Answer 2

Just simply add those symbols to your text, and execute it as SQL query:

INSERT INTO tbl_name VALUES ("Here's my text: ©®");

When you want to display it one the website don't do anything with these symbols (but remember to escape at least <, >, & (using htmlspecialchars()) cause those has special meaning in XML/SGML (HTML) documents)

PS. Also remember to escape text passed to SQL query using mysql_real_escape_string() to avoid any SQL Injection problems. If your server has magic_quotes_gpc enabled disable it or at least filter your GET/POST/COOKIE data to its raw value. You should always consciously escape values.

EDIT:

According to your comment... I don't remember whether magic_quotes_gpc are enabled by default but you can easily undone magic quotes effect. Just on the very beginning of your PHP code add something like this:

if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
  array_walk_recursive($_GET, 'stripslashes');
  array_walk_recursive($_POST, 'stripslashes');
  array_walk_recursive($_COOKIE, 'stripslashes');
}

Now each GPC value should be always raw - without quotes - so you have to escape it manually before passing any variable into query.

Answer 3

From the PHP docs for htmlentities():

This function is identical to htmlspecialchars() in all ways, except with htmlentities(), all characters which have HTML character entity equivalents are translated into these entities.

Don't worry about encoding things when you store them: store the data raw, and then encode it with htmlentities() when you display it in your HTML.

Edit: Also, read this.