How to change character encoding of a PDO/SQLite connection in PHP?

Question

I'm having a little problem with a php-gtk app that keeps running into non-utf8 strings, I had found that the problem is in the database connection, even when the database is supposed to be in UTF-8.

I had tried with the "SET CHARACTER SET utf8"(MySQL way) and the "SET NAMES UTF8" and nothing happen (there isn't any information about none of this commands in the "Query Language Understood by SQLite " page either, so I'm not surprised about that).

PD: Maybe the connection is already in UTF-8 and the data isn't, but if there is a way to change the connection encoding this question would still be useful.

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, SQLite only has one setting for charset, which is on a per-database level. You can't change the encoding on the connection.

The C API has two different ways of opening a connection, either as UTF-8 or UTF-16. I would expect PHP's SQLite module (And thus PDO) to simply use the UTF-8 version. If that's correct, I would expect that a SQLite connection is always UTF-8. This means that you ought to manually encode/decode strings with utf8_encode/utf8_decode.

Also see: http://www.alberton.info/dbms_charset_settings_explained.html