Last week I've received a mail from a customer complaining, that his MySQL entries are not correctly read out on his webpage (Umlaut problems, e.g. ä ü é). First I thought there is a problem with his website charset but nope, all is set to ISO-8859-1 (his website AND of course the MySQL DB/Table/Field). He told me he does the entries not via a web form but direct via phpMyAdmin.

I recently installed the latest version 3.1.0 so my guess was now, that there is a problem with this version. After some testing with phpMyAdmin version 2.5.7-pl1, 2.11.9.3 and 3.1.0 I can now summarize this:

- 2.5.7-pl1: This old and outdated version shows the phpMyAdmin website with a standard HTML output of iso-8859-1. The Umlaut entries you do manually direct via phpMyAdmin are correct and can be read out without problems.

- 2.11.9.3: This is the newest phpMyAdmin 2 version. It shows the phpMyAdmin website with a standard HTML output of utf-8. The Umlaut entries you do manually direct via phpMyAdmin are correct and can be read out without problems (although it is done with utf-8!).

- 3.1.0: This is the newest phpMyAdmin 3 version. It shows the phpMyAdmin website with a standard HTML output of utf-8. The Umlaut entries you do manually direct via phpMyAdmin are NOT correct, the website and phpMyAdmin show some weird signes (ä instead of ä).

I've opened a thread in the German support forum of phpMyAdmin <- click. Until there is a resolution I suggest you use version 2.11.9.3 for manual inserts via phpMyAdmin on a latin1 DB.

Update August 2011: The latin1 problem seems to have disappeared with the new version 3.4.x