GeoNames Forum

Hello, great service keep it up! My question is related to the data itself.

I noted, for instance, in Hawaii there are strange looking entries inserted like this,

Kahaluâ€˜u Landing
KahekapÅâ€˜eleâ€˜ele Valley

Does anyone else see this? Are those special characters supposed to be escaped characters or something special? If so, can someone pls. explain how to properly print/decipher ?

Thank you in advance for assistance. Have a good day.

Hi

The data is in UTF8 encoding. Make sure you configure your database with the same encoding when loading the dump files.

Cheers

Marc

Ah very good, that makes sense.... I thought there was some sort of encoding going on. Ok, I setup my DB under this UTF8.

I am using this to decode the string, but still getting funny results:

<?php
$incoming_utf8 = "KahekapÅâ€˜eleâ€˜ele Valley";
$decoded_string = utf8_decode ($incoming_utf8);
echo $decoded_string;

?>

In this case, I get back 'Kah?n?li‘i Valley'. There seems to be some other formulations of this PHP to un-encode, ... but they are all pretty glitchy. Can you suggest what I might be doing wrong?

Thank you so much! You are very helpful. :-)

SATCHEL
Do you use database (which one?) or web service?

Actually, I followed the helpful tips & instructions from this post, and now everything works fine. Very good!

http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/615.page