Talk In Code

Sometimes, especially when moving data from one server to another, you might find that you have encoded your MySQL database incorrectly. This problem with first show itself if you have the database encoded in one charset and your website set to display in another. If this is the case then you will find strange characters appearing in your text, especially when using punctuation marks. If you are unable or unwilling to change the character encoding on the site then you need to change how the data is encoded in the database.

The most common sort of thing you might want to do is change from iso-8859-1 (or windows-1252) to UTF-8. This can be done in one of two ways.

The first way is to simply alter the table so that the column contains a different charset.

ALTER TABLE table MODIFY col1 VARCHAR(50) CHARACTER SET 'utf8';

However, if your database has already been set up and your data has already been inserted in the wrong format then you can also update the data in the column using the CONVERT command. The following snippet turns our latin1 data into uncoded binary data and then into utf8.

UPDATE table SET col1=CONVERT(CONVERT(CONVERT(col1 USING 'latin1') USING BINARY) USING 'utf8');

You should also make sure that the connection to the database is done through a specific character set. This is done by using the SET NAMES command and the SET CHARACTER SET.

SET NAMES 'charset_name'
SET CHARACTER SET 'charset_name';

These two commands basically set some values in your MySQL database, for more information on what is set look at the Connection Character Sets and Collations page on the MySQL website. This ensures that the data we get back from the database is also in the correct charset.

For a full list of the different character sets available in MySQL just run the command:

SHOW CHARACTER SET;

This will display a table with the columns Charset, Description, Default collation and Maxlen. Each charset is associated with a collation. A collation is a set of rules for comparing characters in a charset, so it is important that you get this right if you want the database to work. The full list of collations can be viewed using the following command:

SHOW COLLATION;

You can even use a LIKE statement to refine the collation data into the information you are looking for.

SHOW COLLATION WHERE Charset LIKE '%utf%'

The following script can be used if you want to simulate a typewriter in an element on screen. I have put in a lot of comments to describe what is happening but the script works by taking each array element in turn and adding it character by character to the content of the selected element.

<script type="text/javascript">
// set up text to print, each item in array is new line
var aText = new Array(
"line 1",
"line 2",
"line 3",
"line 4",
"line 5",
"    ",
"line 7",
"line 8",
"THE END "
);
var iSpeed = 100; // time delay of print out
var iIndex = 0; // start printing array at this posision
var iArrLength = aText[0].length; // the length of the text array
var iScrollAt = 20; // start scrolling up at this many lines
 
var iTextPos = 0; // initialise text position
var sContents = ''; // initialise contents variable
var iRow; // initialise current row
 
function typewriter()
{
 sContents = ' ';
 iRow = Math.max(0, iIndex-iScrollAt);
 var destination = document.getElementById("typedtext");
 
 while ( iRow < iIndex ) {
  sContents += aText[iRow++] + '<br />';
 }
 destination.innerHTML = sContents + aText[iIndex].substring(0, iTextPos) + "_";
 if ( iTextPos++ == iArrLength ) {
  iTextPos = 0;
  iIndex++;
  if ( iIndex != aText.length ) {
   iArrLength = aText[iIndex].length;
   setTimeout("typewriter()", 500);
  }
 } else {
  setTimeout("typewriter()", iSpeed);
 }
}
</script>

You can run this script by either including an onload attribute in the body tag, or by placing a call to the typewriter() function after the element that you want to use to fill the text with.

<div id="typedtext"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">typewriter();</script>


Detecting what key a person has pressed can be important at times, but the key that has been pressed is passed to the browser as a code, rather than a character. To get around this you therefore need to detect what character is being pressed via the code that the character produces. This is done with the keyCode property of the event object in IE and the which property of the event in every other browser. The following code will allow you to get the character code in most modern browsers.

var keynum;
if(window.event){ // IE
 keynum = e.keyCode;
}else if(e.which){ // Netscape/Firefox/Opera
 keynum = e.which;
}

To run this code, and actually do something useful with it, use the onkeypress event on the HTML tag of your choice, note that some tags do not support this event.

<input type="text" name="input" id="input" onkeypress="getKeyCode(event)" />